Cosmo Music Canada are closing their doors after 57 years in business.
They will stay open as they sell off inventory, and then the store in the greater Toronto area will close and the location will switch over to Long & McQuade, along with the school.
More details to follow.
Although I wasn’t aware of Cosmo Music, this is a pertinent reminder to shop locally owned music stores when possible!
My local music store doesn’t offer much in the way of synthesizers or drum machines, but when I need cables or strings, or anything else I can scoop there, I make sure to buy from them instead of online retailers. Happy to pay a little markup to support them, as they are great folks.
I no longer live in Toronto, but that store is way up in the northern suburbs; it would have taken me two hours to get there on public transit. I was not aware of them before, but I know about Long & McQuade. Curious that L&McQ are taking over the location and school but not the remaining inventory. I guess Cosmo have some debts remaining to service.
An additional part to the story.
Behringer some years back decided to cut out the middleman ( the wholesale distributor ) and deal directly with select retail stores – they call these sellers their Super Partners.
In Canada their Super Partner is Cosmo Music. No word yet on what Behringer plans to do. This is more important at the moment as the Republican Tariffs in the US have caused Behringer to make significant cost increases to their US prices.
Sticking with Canada here. Elbows up.
ADDED : After looking into this some it looks like Long & McQuade at least, will be handling Behringer. They have 100 stores across Canada. Behringer lists them on their where to buy.
Sad stuff. I ordered from them once or twice and they were very good. Even threw in a free beanie hat.
Plus I’m still depressed from Moog audio closing the Toronto store.
Yep same here. Only ever shopped Cosmo online and I’m sad to see them go, but I spent a loooooot of time at Moog Audio’s Queen West location and I’m still upset they’re not there.
The original Cosmo was a much smaller store that wasn’t too far from where I grew up. I drove out to the new location a couple times, most recently last year. They had this area where all of their pedals were set up with a system where you could plug in and demo them. Very cool.
Bought my first ever synthesizer from them: a Kurzweil K2000!
Gonna miss 'em.
That’s one bad ass pedal board! They would have had to call the cops and drag me out of there!
Sounds like they are selling off whatever they can, right down to the store fixtures and displays, so maybe some of this pedal wall gear is available too ! All the in-store demo equipment might be negotiable too.
Stores like this become part of the community they are in, the people that worked there, a place you’d go and discover new things, which now gets locked into a history once they’re gone.
My only music store experience is GuitarCenter where you can’t even get any reliable information for the most part let alone demo anything… wow. Now i feel really bad for them.
That is called Pedal Planet.
It was put up only a year ago. Maybe you can own your own piece of Pedal Planet.
The school looks good with a lot of teachers so it’s good that it is going to live on.
Makes me sad to see brick and mortar stores like this not be able to survive
They had a free, on and off ( because of covid ), music fest, CosmoFEST for a number of years, that included some major performers.
There had been talk of a 2025 show, which obviously is now not to be.
ADDED : There was an Expo that went along with CosmoFEST for a few years. Here’s a good interview that came from one of those Expos with Eddie Kramer about working with Jimi Hendrix, and his sound. ( video )
