Two Sisters, a Franklin Vinyl Shop, and a New Address Underneath Nashville’s Newest Concert Hall
There is a particular kind of retail that a city either has or does not have, and no amount of development money can conjure it. A good independent record store is one of them. It requires someone who knows the difference between stock and inventory, who will take a trade on a box of somebody's late father's LPs, and who is willing to be open on a Tuesday afternoon when three people come in.
Nashville is getting another one, in about the least likely spot on the map.
What is opening, and where
Luna Record Shop is adding a second location at 930 Exchange Lane in Nashville Yards — the downtown development anchored, for music purposes, by the concert venue The Pinnacle. The new store runs roughly 2,500 square feet, about double the original, and is slated to open by the end of this year. Nashville-based Harvest Construction is handling the buildout; Southwest Value Partners, which owns Nashville Yards, is the landlord.
The shop is run by sisters Brenna Gentry and Calvert Gentry McMahan, fourth-generation Franklinites who opened the original in November 2021 at 230 Franklin Road, inside the Factory at Franklin. They sell new and used vinyl, plus new CDs and cassettes, vintage music posters and assorted merchandise, and they buy and trade — which is the part that actually makes a record store a record store rather than a shelf of shrink-wrapped reissues.
Why the address is the story
Put a record shop directly beneath a major concert venue and you have built something with a natural rhythm to it. People show up downtown hours before doors. They have time to kill and a specific artist on their mind. Some meaningful fraction of them would rather spend forty minutes flipping through bins than sitting in a bar, and a few of them will walk into the show carrying an album they did not own that morning.
That is a genuinely good idea, and it is not a new one — the relationship between record stores and venues is older than either sister — but it is unusual to see it deliberately designed into a new development rather than emerging by accident over twenty years on a side street.
It also says something about what Nashville Yards is trying to become. The site has been steadily accumulating pieces that are not offices: a 6,700-square-foot social darts hall is going in underneath The Pinnacle, and the development recently landed a corporate headquarters as well. A vinyl shop is a small tenant next to those. It may also be the one that most determines whether the place feels like a neighborhood or a campus.
The improbable health of a format that died twice
It is worth pausing on how strange this is. Vinyl was declared finished in the late 1980s when CDs arrived, and declared finished again in the 2000s when downloads did. Instead it has spent the last fifteen-plus years growing, to the point where a shop can justify doubling its footprint and opening in some of the most expensive retail space in the city.
Nashville, of all places, should not be surprised. This is a town where a meaningful share of residents work in or adjacent to the record business, where the physical object still functions as a calling card, and where a pressing plant is a normal thing to drive past. Records here are not purely nostalgic. They are, for a lot of people, professional.
What it means for Franklin
The Factory location is not going anywhere, and the sisters are not leaving the town their family has lived in for four generations. Williamson County keeps the original; downtown gets the bigger room.
Look for the doors to open at Nashville Yards before the end of 2026 — which, if the timing works out, means the first serious test will be a winter run of shows at The Pinnacle and a few thousand people with an hour to spare.
