Buy Rite Music

01 / The story of this place

Make time for these

Buy-Rite Music has sold records out of a storefront on West Seven Mile Road since 1980, and by the late 1980s it had become one of the shops that fed Detroit's underground dance music scene. Sherard Ingram, who later performed as DJ Stingray, worked behind the counter there, and it was through the shop that he got to know James Stinson and Gerald Donald, the duo behind the mysterious electro group Drexciya; the store stocked their earliest twelve-inch singles, buying them fifty copies at a time and putting them straight on the shelves for local DJs to find. Along with a handful of other Detroit shops, Buy-Rite helped build the word-of-mouth network that turned techno and electro from a local curiosity into a genre with a global following. More than four decades after it opened, the shop is still standing on Seven Mile, a rare survivor from the golden age of Detroit's independent record stores.

1. Selling records on West Seven Mile Road since 1980
2. DJ Stingray (Sherard Ingram) worked here in the late 1980s
3. Sold some of the earliest Drexciya twelve-inch singles
4. One of the shops that built Detroit's techno and ghettotech scene