There’s a bigger hype about Record Store
Day today than last year, it’s a growing event in the music calendar, but like
Glastonbury, it’s lost the very thing that made it special. If you want to make independent record
stores truly accessible, then having to queue at four in the morning to have
even a chance of getting hold of a record by your favourite band, at an
exorbitant price, isn’t a selling point for it.
The nature of the event makes it an easy
target for ebay profiteers. At 7am this
morning, there were copies of Morrissey’s Suedehead on sale for £70 on ebay,
even before most shops had opened. At
9am at Piccadilly Records in Manchester, there was a guy driving round
directing people who were clearly in his employ as to what to get when they got
in. I stood in a queue on Tib Street,
round the block from the store which opened at 8 and didn’t move for 20
minutes. I gave up.
That’s not what the event is meant to be
about, it’s about music fans shopping in real music shops, rather than the
soulless caverns such as HMV, where DVD and Bluray are now king, and the mail
order world of amazon, or worst the click and download lossy Apple empire.
The pricing doesn’t help matters
either. Seven-inch singles have been
getting more expensive over time, but can anyone seriously justify charging £8
for a single? This admittedly isn’t just
an RSD thing – looking in HMV on Oxford St the other week, the Maccabees’ album
on CD was £2 cheaper than a single off that album. But you have to suspect the Kensington and
Hammersmith industry mafia are rubbing their hands in glee at the gift horse
opportunity to repackage old material to shift at a huge mark-up, all in the
spirit of saving indie stores.
Expressing my views on Twitter this morning
and within minutes, Stephen Holt from the Inspiral Carpets responded “you old
cynic, you” and he might have a point in some respects, but there’s much more
that can be done to save our local indie stores.
If the major label record industry is
serious about supporting the independent music store network, and you suspect
it isn’t, there are things they can do that don’t involve charging £45 for a
double vinyl 180g Fleetwood Mac album or £17.99 for a two-track Arcade Fire
12”, way above the normal market price for such items. They could start by producing independent
store exclusive material the whole year round.
It’s happened in the past, limited sleeves, free posters, exclusive
bonus CDs in certain stores and it would provide the record buyer with a reason
to shop in their local indie store rather than the high street or on-line and
provide a life-blood to those stores struggling to continue their existence.
The other thing they could do would be
equalize the playing field in terms of prices charged. The big retailers benefit from volume of
scale discounts that the independent stores can’t achieve. This makes your local indie store more
expensive than HMV and online for new releases.
In these times of austerity, people will vote with their wallets. And this threatens the very existence of
these stores. There’s very few, if any,
independent store openings now, but tales of established, well-run stores
closing because the economics of the business has killed them off.
Record Store Day won’t save our independent
record stores. You need to get people
through the door every day not just one day.
It leaves music enthusiasts to pay stupid prices on ebay to complete
their collection if they can’t beat the scalpers to the queue. The stores win at the tills for a day, but
it’s a painkiller rather than a cure to the economic ills that are forcing some
of them to the wall. Which is bad news
for us all.
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