The Avalanche falls: How Record Store Day closed a shop

Edinburgh record store Avalanche is closing up - and, ironically, it's partly the success of Record Store Day that is to blame.

In a blog on the shop's site, the grim story of how the revival of vinyl sales has turned out to bite the ass of the very stores which kept going through the lean times:

Then there is another dilemma. We go on social media and say this will without doubt be one of our albums of the year and many of our followers will simply go to FOPP or HMV and buy it because they are nearer. But there is more.

When the Frightened Rabbit album was announced I immediately received enquiries as to whether there would be an Avalanche or indies special. We had sold 110 out of 500 of the last limited vinyl. At the time HMV/FOPP were in administration and only stocking important titles on CD. Vinyl was not considered an important enough format for any artist even when they were playing an in-store as Frightened Rabbit were. I was fairly sure but not certain that this time there was no special format something that was recently confirmed. Meanwhile fans were encouraged to buy from the band’s Warners website with the vinyl a bargain £12.99 for a signed copy. Again as I suspected this is actually less than the cost to a shop who would expect to sell it for £16.99. Want a signed CD ? That will be Amazon or the band website at a price this time just above cost.

And where vinyl was once an audiophile treat, it has become so commonplace again that the sense of special event doesn't make sense; nor is vinyl any more bringing footfall:

Never mind the week before has some great releases. Explosions In The Sky with a limited vinyl except that their UK label put it on sale ages ago at again a price below cost. The Last Shadow Puppets also have a limited vinyl but you can be sure their label will email the entire LSP/Arctic Monkeys fan base to sell directly and if previous emails are anything to go by not even mention it will be available in shops. That leaves us with a limited indies only Mogwai vinyl which shops are at least given a fair chance to sell.

Depressing as all this might be for a shop like myself it is nothing compared to the Record Store Day list for this year. Given the fantastic rosters many record companies and labels have what shops have been offered is a huge disappointment but not a great surprise given vinyl reissues were once an unusual occurrence whereas they now appear every week. Collectors will still buy the artists they collect but it is no wonder so many shops are asking what people are looking for as it is impossible to guess what these once a year customers will buy.

And in news that isn't unrelated at all:

Sainsbury’s has announced it’s going to be selling vinyl albums from Monday March 21.

The supermarket will sell LPs for the first time since the 1980s following the success of Adele’s 25 which sold over 300,000 in the retailer’s stores.

We hear a lot about how vinyl is back. Not entirely convinced its back to such an extent that the market can sustain supermarkets muscling in.

Happy Record Store Day

When you were six:

Your dad: We've got to go visit Great Aunt Marylou
You: Don't wanna. She's not got anything to play with and it's boring.
Your dad: How about if I get you a special toy on the way?
You: Maybe...
Your dad: And we won't have to go again for a whole year

Now:

Your local record shop: Please come and see us
You: Don't wanna. You've got terrible stock and it's expensive.
Your local record shop: How about if I had a special Suede album?
You: Maybe...
Your local record shop: And... I suppose we won't see for a whole year afterwards

New music from a long-silent source

This is probably one for the old people. Remember when Ministry wasn't the Jesus Built My Hotrod Ministry, and was the I Wanted To Tell Her new wave band?

They're back.

Well, no, they're not. But the question 'I wonder if Al Jourgensen would rather that the world forgot about the synthpop years' has been soundly answered. It's 'no, he's not ashamed of those years', as for Record Store Day the archives have been opened, and this is out for the first time:

The Boxing Day to RSD's Christmas

What day follows Record Store Day, year-in, year-out?

Ah, yes, 'rushing to lob everything onto eBay to sell for a healthy profit day'. Very much the cold leftovers from Record Store Day's turkey lunch.

Amongst the spirit-missing money-grubbing, there's someone trying to shake down £400 for the Dave Matthews stuff and Sex Pistols box sets listed with prices well over a hundred quid; David Bowie's 2012 RSD Starman 7" has been bidded up from a start of 99p to - at time of sighing heavily and typing - £101.

Record Store Day: The downside

It's Record Store Day. Hoooooorah!

Or maybe not hooooorah. Maybe it's only half a cheer. Phil Hebblethwaite at The Quietus has done a great investigation which suggests that what was once a great way of helping out the independent music retailer has started to become a bit of an albatross:

Suspicions that Record Store Day 2014 was causing havoc behind the scenes were confirmed when on March 14 distribution company Kudos published a blog detailing their frustrations. "Kudos' physical release schedule will be pretty quiet for the next few weeks," it began. "This isn't a seasonal issue… The cause of this new release drought might surprise you: Record Store Day."
[...]
"It feels like it has been appropriated by major labels and larger indies to the extent that smaller labels who push vinyl sales for the other 364 days of the year are effectively penalised."

The problem isn't that One Direction are releasing a 7" single for Record Store Day so much as they're releasing a single on Record Store Day. If the major labels really wanted to help the indie retail sector by releasing something nice and exclusive to them, they could do it any day of the year - imagine if, say, July 23rd saw a One Direction 7" arriving in physical shops. Imagine if that sort of leverage to bring in extra custom wasn't being deployed on a day when there's already a whole bunch of activity trying to bring in extra custom. And without destroying the ecosystem which the day is supposed to be supporting.

Young people "buying so many cassettes they're evolving fingers shaped like pencils to tighten the spools', BBC believe

Hey, you know what? Kids today! They're buying cassettes like they're coming back into fashion.

That's what the BBC say, anyway:

One in 10 young people has bought a music cassette tape in the last month, a new survey done to coincide with Record Store Day suggests.

The research suggests that physical formats are still more popular than digital downloads.

In the last year, 57% of the people surveyed had bought a CD, while 39% had purchased an MP3 download.

In the last month.

There's just over four million 20-24 year olds in the UK, so that would imply 400,000 cassettes sold each month just to that proportion of the 18-24 year old age group. Let's be generous and assume 18 & 19 year olds bought no cassettes at all, and that for the other 11 months of the year, none of this age group bought any cassettes.

How does this figure fit with cassette sales?

Well, we know that in 2013, album sales on media other than CD, vinyl or digital download accounted for just 73,000 sales. That's cassettes, but also box sets of vinyl, DVD Audio and other strange beasts. But let's pretend that it's all tape, shall we?

Ah, but for singles, the figure for 'others' is six million or so. Could that be where all these cassette purchases are hidden?

Probably not - the other figure for 2012 was nearly four and a half million, and we know just 604 of those were cassingles. Even if we - again generously - assume a 100-fold increase in cassette single sales between 2012 and 2013, that's 60,400 sales.

So, even on the most generous and lax granting of licence, and over-estimating like we're Nigel Farage putting in his office running costs, we make that 133,000 cassettes sold in 2013.

So, for the Record Store Day figures to hold up, we're going to have to believe that a thin sliver of the national demographic suddenly bought four times as many tapes in March 2014 as the entire population in the whole of 2013 on the loosest possible reading of the figures.

In other words: this is absolute tock-widdle, and the BBC should be ashamed of running it as fact. But not as ashamed as Record Store Day should be of putting out such ramtwaddle.

After all...

If 1 in 10 "young people" bought a cassette last year, Record Store Day wouldn't exist. If you believe that survey you are a prize chump.

— Hugh Platt (@HughDoVoodoo) April 16, 2014

Twittergem: Record Store Day

I used to distrust anyone over a certain age who didn't own a record player; now I distrust anyone under a certain age who does #hipsterscum

— Simon Price (@simon_price01) April 21, 2012

Record Store Day: Blur single released as a download

Record Store Day was another massive success on its own terms yesterday, although how far bringing in the sort of people who should be shopping in record stores is a victory is up for debate. There's a bit of a feel that RSD is starting to skew towards the collector and the obscurantist (or at least the hipster) which makes it feel one part 'preaching to the converted' to one part 'giving the impression that record shops really are all like that one in High Fidelity and if you're not interested in short-run 7" vinyl releases or having scorn thrown on your tastes by a bloke behind the counter in a No Sell t-shirt you probably should steer clear'.

One of the few events which might have tempted people less comfortable in record shops over the threshold, the exclusive limited Blur single, has now been slightly undermined by Blur putting the track up for free online the next day:

Blur’s manager Chris Morrison has said it is important that the song was made available to fans legally. "To avoid fans having to illegally obtain an inferior copy of this track from pirate sites – we have made it freely available through the band’s website".

Fair enough, it's a nice move for the fans. But - given they would have been able to get it for free anyway, albeit without the band's blessing - isn't this effectively saying "see? there was no need to schlep down to the shop and buy the thing, as it's been released, with our blessing, digitally, almost simultaneously. Who but a chump would go and buy plastic circles?"

Record Store Day

It is, of course, Record Store Day today in the UK and elsewhere (the "elsewhere" being why it's called Store and not Shop day) - there's probably something happening near you, unless you live in Milton Keynes.

Downloadable: Record Store Day gives away Black Lips

You might think, if you swallow the music industry's standpoint whole, that giving away a free download is a counter-intuitive way of promoting a day designed to show much love for record shops.

Luckily, the organisers of this year's Record Store Day (April 18th this year) have no such over-simplistic qualms, and are promoting themselves, and the new Black Lips record, with a free download.