06:35 PM CST on Friday, February 24, 2006

By Nancy Holland / 11 News

Click to watch video

By the end of March Cactus Music and Video will close.

Its owners are retiring and some people have said buying music from a brick and mortar store is going the way of the telegram.

To some people the closing of Cactus is more than just a store shutting its doors.

This was the sound of music for more than 30 years at this Cactus store.

“Here’s another picture of Hank Williams signing autographs in dad’s store,” Bud Daily said as he pointed to one of many photos on the wall.

But look around and you realize Bud Daily’s history goes back to collecting nickels from his dad’s jukeboxes, to 78s, LPs and 45s.

“Sold a beaucoup bunch of those too though,” Daily said.

Music was a family business and passion.

While his dad produced artists from country to the Big Bopper, Bud Daily sold records to people with eclectic tastes.

But not a lot of people like getting music from independent stores anymore.  Like Cactus, their time is ending.

By the end of March they will all be gone, not just the CDs and tapes that filled the bins, but for a lot of young artists—the chance.

The loss of that side of the business is another of Bud Daily regrets.

“The future of a young artist is really, really, really tough and it takes a lot of money to do the promotion and so forth,” Daily said.

A honky-tonk singer named Miss Leslie knows that.

When she released a CD called “Honky Tonk Revival” she couldn’t waltz into Wal-Mart and get it on the shelf.  But Cactus coaxed its customers to look at local talent.

Here she had a place.

“I think a lot of people when they were looking for what’s the new local band, what’s the new local music, they’d come to Cactus and they’d look for what was out that was new that they hadn’t seen before,” said Leslie Lindley, Miss Leslie & Her Juke-Jointers.

It will be harder now, harder to be found on the Internet, harder to find a home on the shelves.

For a lot of local artists Cactus didn’t sell little plastic discs it grew dreams.