💥New Chapter 11 Bankruptcy - Sam Ash Music Corporation💥
Old school music store is liquidating. Is there a savior somewhere?
Cue the requiem, or a dirge in a minor key. On May 8, 2024, NY-based Sam Ash Music Corporation and 11 affiliates (“Sam Ash” or the “company” and collectively, the “debtors”) savagely filed for bankruptcy in the District of New Jersey (Judge Meisel) during … wait for it … the year of its 100 anniversary, 😬. There is nothing “rock n roll” about that denouement. Cue “Dust in the Wind”…
… because the ongoing retail apocalypse appears to have claimed another scalp. Bankruptcy in this case — like several of the other recent retail bankruptcies (e.g., rue21, 99 Cents Only, Express?) — means liquidation…
…though the debtors are holding out some hope that there’s a 363 sale here of some kind. That’s right, on one hand you’ve got an army of liquidator types working with the debtors — we’re talking Tiger Capital Group LLC and Gordon Brothers Retail Partners LLC and A&G Real Estate Partners LLC — and, on the other hand, you’ve got Tiger Finance LLC providing a $20mm DIP (most of which is a roll-up of the $18.2mm+ outstanding under the debtors’ pre-petition ABL) and credit bidding it as a floor bid — at an estimated price of $9.1mm — for a proposed “going concern sale” of IP/e-commerce assets/FF&E/inventory/leasehold-interests/spitwads.* Basically, Tiger, out of multiple entities, is driving this bus and that bus is keeping things on an awfully tight schedule: