NEWS
EVENTS
The Last Of The Pick ‘n’ Mix
Indie | Wednesday 29th August 2012 | Osh
It’s a funny thing work experience. Years ago it used to mean making the tea and hoping to pick up a few tips off a disgruntled employee who’d drawn the short straw. They’d shove you in a corner and pretty much hope that you’d just stay there, so they could fill their ‘community help’ quota and you could add another line to your CV with minimal fuss. Nowadays however, especially in the anaemic economy of journalism, the work experience kid is basically free labour – a staff member you handily don’t have to pay or argue with, since they’re eternally grateful you just let them through the door in the first place. Last week that kid was me and in an understaffed office, I was entrusted on my first day to go out and find some article-worthy news of my own choosing.
The area this paper covers includes some of the trendier parts of North London, Hampstead and Highgate being their main areas. The district that immediately caught my attention though was Camden. The centre of the world for 14 year old emos everywhere, it’s also home to some of my favourite record shops and being the highly professional journo-wannabe that I am, I tried to think of any contrived reason to justify spending half the day in these establishments.
The hypothesis I eventually came up with revolved around the idea that recently vinyl sales have been enjoying a revival. It’s a kind of belief that’s been going round in music circles for a while and I thought this would make a nice, feel good story to sit next to the usual spiel about Tescos overlords pushing out local greengrocers. How wrong I was.
After a brief chat on the phone with the owners of ‘Sounds that Swing’ and ‘On the Floor Records’, I was none the wiser about this supposed revival. The former suggested that there definitely has been a renewed interest amongst young people in vinyl, whilst the latter was very adamant that there’d been nothing of the sort. Contrasting viewpoints are always a good basis for an article though, so I proposed to my editor that I head down to Camden for further investigation and luckily I was allowed.
For what I found upon talking to these owners in person is that any sort of vinyl renaissance is a mere drop in the ocean compared to the problems facing London’s record shops. The blunt truth of the matter is that any spike in vinyl sales is merely serving to arrest the rate of decline, rather than stop it altogether. In an industry where legal downloads are as much of a threat to their business as legal, every owner is crystal clear that fewer and fewer people want the physical product these days. What’s more is poor sales aren’t even the main issue. Particularly in desirable tourist spots like Camden, landlords are quite happy to price their tenants out of the market, which has resulted in even massive corporations like Virgin (before they royally cocked everything up) were forced to up and move.
The saddest thing was that the record shop I’ve most frequently visited in Camden, Music and Goods Exchange, told me they’re essentially up for sale, and will have definitely closed down by the turn of the year. The others in the area aren’t set to fare any better, with a couple quoting their lease expiries in 2014 as the point where they’ll probably have to call it a day.
If this all sounds quite obvious to you, I apologise. Because whilst everyone knows the music industry as a whole is struggling to cope with a changing landscape, I never realised how immediate the threat facing independent businesses was in this respect. Such places have always had a fairly low turnover, films like ‘Hi Fidelity’ make it abundantly clear but in a weird way that’s part of the charm, a kind of love’s labour occupation. The fact is though that in 2012, this is the tipping point at which this historic business no longer becomes sustainable.
In the next few years, the rate of these shops closing down is just going to increase. As a pretty active vinyl collector, it’s pretty devastating news to me. The medium’s become a bit of a hipster trend of late, with people talking about how it sounds so much better than those horrible MP3s. I don’t particularly care about that side of it – if I did, I’d be one of those even more pretentious people who only listens to FLAC files (that’s as tech nerdy as I’ll get, promise). No, what I really love is the physical side of it, the gigantic artwork, the liner notes, even the vinyl itself, it feels substantial, its feels like you’ve got your money’s worth. You can display them on shelves and it becomes a constantly shifting tapestry of your personality, beliefs and tastes. It doesn’t quite have the same effect when someone asks about your music taste and you have to wait for ten minutes as your virus-laden Windows creaks into life.
So to conclude, it’s just really sad that this is the way the business is heading. I’d say to everyone to go out into record shops and stop this decline, but in reality I should really say go out and enjoy them whilst you can. You’ll still be able to buy vinyls and CDs online, but the days of flicking through dusty cases with labels scrawled in permanent marker are soon to be tragically lost to the past, like Woolworths pick and mix. Particularly in London’s cultural hotspots, record shops no longer seem to have the economic leeway that’s allowed them to survive since they stopped being the default place to go for music lovers. Now they’re just an increasingly specialist establishment for a small group of people who aren’t completely willing to adhere to the sort of wireless, paperless society we’ve been born into. Whilst I have no particular issue with those who do subscribe to such a thing, I do think that these people should at least give a record shop one token visit before they become too hard to find. You just never know what you might come away with.
Alex Bellotti
