Record Store Day

As it's Record Store Day here's Ralph's thoughts on record shops.....


Recently as Jim Gellatly pointed out in his column in The Sun (and he makes a good point in The Sun article) that HMV lost the plot a bit focusing all their energies on DVD and game sales and music became the poor relation.  Hopefully HMV will redress the imbalance by re-thinking their strategy, as there is still a need on the High Street for proper 'record shops'.




However, unlike Jim, I've never been of the opinion that the 'Indie' record shops were intimidating, quite the opposite as they tend to be friendly, welcoming places where they build up a relationship with their customers (which happens to an extent in HMV but will never happen in the supermarkets).  You need only look at the likes of VoxBox in Edinburgh who only opened up in mid 2011 and who started out buying and selling pre-owned records but are now branching out into selling new vinyl releases too. Furthermore there's a renewed interest among 'Indie' bands and their followers for physical copies, whether it be CD's or Vinyl and the art of the record cover is very much still to the fore.  Jim finished has interview with a quote that is definitely true though... "I guarantee you will always remember the first record or CD you bought, but you'll never remember the first song you downloaded."









For my part, I've never used iTunes or Amazon or any other downloadable format to buy music.  I shop 'Indie' or HMV for my music in hard-copy and avoid the supermarkets like the plague (unless I want to eat horse meat of course) and I hope more people will do the same.