After a nearly 12-year run, Sub Pop’s store at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport went off to the great tarmac in the sky, closing at the end of 2025.
It was a certifiable bummer for the black-and-white “Loser” brigade that has championed outsider music (and sold a bunch of T-shirts) with a uniquely Seattle edge going on four decades. But the closure inadvertently sent Sub Pop brass on a hunt for a new retail location that led them back to where the label almost began.
Sub Pop is opening a store along the downtown Seattle waterfront, just the flick of a guitar pick from the ferry terminal and Ivar’s Acres of Clams at Pier 54.
“When we realized that we were going to lose the airport location, we knew we wanted to have another space that wouldn’t be exactly the same thing, but maybe it could be something different and equally wonderful,” Sub Pop CEO Megan Jasper said.
The new spot, opening April 1 in the Maritime Building at 908 Alaskan Way, gives the venerable record label a similarly prominent site in the distinctly Seattle strip trafficked by locals and tourists alike. About the same size as the airport shop, the waterfront joint is effectively a relocation of the Sub Pop on 7th store in the Denny Triangle, which closed this past weekend to gear up for the move.
Opened in 2021, Sub Pop on 7th (and its sticker-splattered storefront) injected a rare shot of good ol’ punk rock spirit into the glassy towered heart of Amazonia, where lunch crowds and laminated badges roam the streets. With another pop-up store inside KEXP’s Gathering Space at Seattle Center, the label opted to close Sub Pop on 7th “just so that we weren’t overdoing it with retail shops,” Jasper said.
While the retail reshuffle was set off by the airport store’s closure, unplugging from Sea-Tac wasn’t necessarily something Sub Pop was itching to do. Initially opened on a short-term basis in 2014, the Sea-Tac shop outlived its life expectancy by about 10 years. As a condition to secure a new long-term lease, Jasper said they would have needed to undergo a “top to bottom” redesign that “would have been really, really expensive.”
Nevertheless, one doesn’t exactly need to squint to see the silver lining in their new high-ceilinged spot along the revamped waterfront. It’s a stretch Jasper, a West Seattleite, and a number of Sub Pop staffers regularly walk on their way to and from the label’s Fourth Avenue office.
“For any of us who have lived here a long time, that waterfront really does show the best of the Pacific Northwest,” Jasper said. “You have the water, the mountains, a lot of mom-and-pop businesses that have opened up in the past couple of years. … It really is uniquely Seattle. So, the thought of being able to have a space there, especially when it’s really this city jewel right now that locals can enjoy and people from out of town will also enjoy, that was really appealing to us.”
Not to mention the bit of almost-history Sub Pop had there. Nearly 40 years ago, when founders Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman were searching for office space for their fledgling record label, they looked at a space inside that same Maritime Building before settling on their original home on the top floor of the Terminal Sales building instead.
“I like to imagine that maybe Bruce and Jon said, ‘Let’s think about that. Can we get back to you in 40 years?’ ” Jasper said.
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