David Emery Online

Record Shops

13 March 2007

Alan McGee – of Creation records fame – has written an interesting blog post about whether we still need record shops on the Guardian Music blog.

The answer, of course, is no.

Lots of people disagree, though.

Now, Alan is an exception, rather then the rule, in this case as he doesn’t go to record shops to buy records as such – as an industry person, he can get all the records he wants for free (and then some), so for him record shops are more market research, just to check things are still ticking over like he thinks they do.

I’ll be honest, I do the same.

I would hazard a guess that for most people in the music industry, the same has been true for a while – they don’t go to record shops to buy music as such, more to find out what’s going on, chat with the staff a bit (don’t forget, they probably know them) and maybe pick up a couple of things that may have slipped through the blagging net.

The difference today is that more and more people get their music for free.

And all of those people that do, really don’t need a record store to recommend music to them – there’s so many alternative methods these days to do that. Sure, there are plenty of people that still buy all their music offline, but more and more sales are moving towards supermarket chains, giving places like HMV, Virgin and Fopp a gloomy future.

What’s worth remembering though is that the specialist retailer – like Rough Trade, for example – isn’t going to go away any time soon. They serve a niche, and the niche they serve has already shown that technology and progress isn’t really something that interests them too much by their continued support of vinyl. Independent record shops can continue, in the same way we get small antique book shops – they’re not going to be a way of making a lot of money, but if you really love records you could make a good enough living catering for a small audience of like minded people.

Recently, I’ve talked with a lot of people that have grown up spending a lot of time in record shops, flicking through records, trying out new things based on the cover art – that kind of thing. When they were doing it, that was the way to find out about new music, outside the media – which for the true music lover was never good enough; never underestimate the power of thinking you’ve discovered something yourself.

Now that you have millions of hours of unheard music at your finger tips, are people going to keep doing that? Do the 15yr olds still go to record stores? I don’t think they do nearly as much, and the ones they do only do because that’s what they think they should do.

MySpace and BitTorrent are the new record stores.