Angela and Leonard Singer were feted at the Phoenix Art Museum last night—after decades of support for the museum, they were given the institution’s “Michael and Heather Greenbaum Leadership Award” at a private party. “After my family, I loved the museum,” Angela Singer said simply.

But the evening was a bit bittersweet, in that the couple were simultaneously overseeing the closing of their Circles Records, after nearly 40 years of business at Central and McKinley.

To say the store—literally a mom and pop operation—was an anomaly in the 21st century is an understatement. For many years the music retail industry has been under attack. “Big box” retailers siphoned off sales by low-balling CD prices to get customers into their stores; Barnes & Noble and Borders moved into music sales; then came the rise of Amazon; and then, of course, came Napster and the vaporization of the music industry, cutting CD sales by 50 percent and counting.

Massive retail chains like Musicland disappeared; so did beloved operations like Tower. Yet through it all Circles remained.

The Singers are now in their 80s. Mr. Singer told me last night that the store had a lot of fixed costs that weren’t being met any more; the years of light-rail construction outside his front door couldn’t have helped either.

I suspect that the store stopped making money many years ago; but the Singers also ran a very successful distribution business, Associated Distribution, which no doubt enabled them to keep their retail operation open long after stand-alone operations might have shuttered.

Distributors routed products from independent labels to stores. Back in the day, before the massive consolidation of the record industry, indie labels produced a significant part of its sales, and the Singers handled Motown, Casablanca (home of Donna Summer and the Village People), and Arista—that was Clive Davis’ massively successful label—for a good chunk of California.

Indeed, Singer recalled, at one point he had to sue Arista when Arista by his lights violated some distribution agreements in San Francisco. The matter was handled in federal court in Phoenix, and Davis himself was deposed, but the label eventually settled out of court.

The main Circles store—the pair had a modest chain during the 1980s—was originally a car dealership; a designer named Phyllis Mann gave it its distinctive interior. It was fun hearing stories from Mr. Singer about the salad days of the industry; one of his staffers, he noted, left to open up his own record store—World Records, at 16th and Camelback—where he worked with a future mayor named Phil Gordon.

(PHXated might have found these stories more interesting than most, having worked at another major Phoenix record-store presence, Odyssey, during those days.)

There’s not much about the Singers or Circles on the web, but there is this nice remembrance from New Times’ Robert Pela:, who worked for the pair in the 1980s:

When the store was remodeled by Angela’s son Michael in 1981, the adjoining office on the north side of the building was turned into what would become the Southwest’s premier classical music store. I remember the hoopla when the revolving glass door that connects Circles Classical and Circles Records was rescued from a Manhattan department store that was about to be demolished and shipped here. At the time, and for a long time after Circles had the only revolving glass door in Phoenix.

Kimber Lanning has watched Circles for many years, as a fellow-music-retail owner and a downtown activist: ""Circles Records is a Phoenix landmark," she said in an email. “Its closing is a sad day for me not only as a downtown proponent but also as a fellow record store owner.”