Artsweek Goes on a Santa Barbara Record Crawl in Search of the Quality Music Retailer.

Isla Vista’s 32-year old Morninglory Music closed its doors for good this week.

Opened by Stan Bernstein as a student at UCSB, Morninglory survived tough competition from rival record stores but closed Monday due to a severe decline in patronage – a 70- percent drop-off in the last two years. Bernstein thanks his remaining customers in an epitaph attached to the storefront, and credits the store’s demise to the college demographic’s appetite for downloaded music.

“[Morninglory] was like the canary in the coal mine,” he said in a phone interview with Artsweek. “We were there longer than any other store in I.V., but I don’t know how to compete against free music.”

Artsweek will continue coverage of Morninglory and file-sharing next week, but for the four people who still buy recorded music, Artsweek made an emergency call to Mr. Bell and DJ Fatkid. They hit the streets together and assembled this communiqu