Did I queue up for hours yesterday to buy a picture disc of “Histoire de Melody Nelson” the colour of a nicotine stain? Or a 78 of “Anarchy in the UK” fashioned from compressed bogies? This may disappoint a few people, but no I did not.
I agree that record shops are an endangered species. Just as with post offices and libraries, our culture will lose something if the physical place where people hear music and talk about it, rather than merely buy it, disappears. Let’s separate the myth from real life, though; those places painted in black to hide the dope stains were always spoken of highly because they were rare. For every Probe or Volume or Missing, the sort of places Nick Hornby wrote “High Fidelity” about, there were numerous greeting card shops that had record racks. People who moan about the supermarkets selling CDs don’t remember, or choose not to remember, how clueless WH Smiths and Boots were about music when it used to be sold in their branches.
It’s a very urban phenomenon, anyway; if you lived in the country or a rather unequipped suburb, you just had to buy things by mail order. Even if rural internet speeds aren’t so good, things are now so much better.
Unfortunately, gamely supporting your local record shop (if you ever had one in the first place) has been confused with records, as in the vinyl format. I’m exactly the right age for this argument, so here goes:
When I started off (Mirror Man by the Human League on 12 inch, by the way*, from The Music Shop in Belle Vale shopping centre**) vinyl was the only real way to do it. CDs were still a millionaire’s plaything, and cassettes, although priced the same as records after years of being priced higher, were flimsy things with crushed, tiny artwork. There were times when tape came in handy – bootlegs, catching things off the radio, portable players, making mixtapes – and recording onto blank cassettes allowed you to miss out the drum solo, but pre-recorded tapes were awful. It was records, records, records.
When I started taking interest in older acts, the likes of Kraftwerk, David Bowie, Can or The Doors were well served because their labels kept a good back catalogue. Re-issue labels did their best to fill in the gaps for other bands whose labels had disappeared – like The Kinks. As CDs grew in popularity, the reissuers had a choice; should they divide their rather marginal market up by making things available as records, cassettes and CDs, or do they choose one format and stick to it? By focussing on CDs, they could then do a much better job of making older music available to new listeners.
So my own music collection grew as a CD collection from the early 1990s onwards. If I bought anything while abroad, Spain was still good for vinyl but France had gone all-CD. I kept buying new records until the bad quality of pressings put me off. Was the drop in quality control a symptom of a struggling business, or a sneaky trick by The Man to make me buy the more profitable CDs? Please send your answer in on a postcard. I don’t moan about the sound quality – my turntable, CD player, amplifier and speakers all came to roughly the same price and, if you look after the discs, they sound as good as each other. Putting a FLAC or a high-bitrate MP3 through the same set-up sounds just as good as well.
So I still play records, but the revival of the format as an object of desire just strikes me as a hipster gimmick. Some foolish youngsters don’t even play them! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-36040746
I agree that record shops are an endangered species. Just as with post offices and libraries, our culture will lose something if the physical place where people hear music and talk about it, rather than merely buy it, disappears. Let’s separate the myth from real life, though; those places painted in black to hide the dope stains were always spoken of highly because they were rare. For every Probe or Volume or Missing, the sort of places Nick Hornby wrote “High Fidelity” about, there were numerous greeting card shops that had record racks. People who moan about the supermarkets selling CDs don’t remember, or choose not to remember, how clueless WH Smiths and Boots were about music when it used to be sold in their branches.
It’s a very urban phenomenon, anyway; if you lived in the country or a rather unequipped suburb, you just had to buy things by mail order. Even if rural internet speeds aren’t so good, things are now so much better.
Unfortunately, gamely supporting your local record shop (if you ever had one in the first place) has been confused with records, as in the vinyl format. I’m exactly the right age for this argument, so here goes:
When I started off (Mirror Man by the Human League on 12 inch, by the way*, from The Music Shop in Belle Vale shopping centre**) vinyl was the only real way to do it. CDs were still a millionaire’s plaything, and cassettes, although priced the same as records after years of being priced higher, were flimsy things with crushed, tiny artwork. There were times when tape came in handy – bootlegs, catching things off the radio, portable players, making mixtapes – and recording onto blank cassettes allowed you to miss out the drum solo, but pre-recorded tapes were awful. It was records, records, records.
When I started taking interest in older acts, the likes of Kraftwerk, David Bowie, Can or The Doors were well served because their labels kept a good back catalogue. Re-issue labels did their best to fill in the gaps for other bands whose labels had disappeared – like The Kinks. As CDs grew in popularity, the reissuers had a choice; should they divide their rather marginal market up by making things available as records, cassettes and CDs, or do they choose one format and stick to it? By focussing on CDs, they could then do a much better job of making older music available to new listeners.
So my own music collection grew as a CD collection from the early 1990s onwards. If I bought anything while abroad, Spain was still good for vinyl but France had gone all-CD. I kept buying new records until the bad quality of pressings put me off. Was the drop in quality control a symptom of a struggling business, or a sneaky trick by The Man to make me buy the more profitable CDs? Please send your answer in on a postcard. I don’t moan about the sound quality – my turntable, CD player, amplifier and speakers all came to roughly the same price and, if you look after the discs, they sound as good as each other. Putting a FLAC or a high-bitrate MP3 through the same set-up sounds just as good as well.
So I still play records, but the revival of the format as an object of desire just strikes me as a hipster gimmick. Some foolish youngsters don’t even play them! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-36040746
As Record Store Day is always Saturday, the same morning as Radio 2 broadcasts “Sound of the Sixties”, I check if Brian Matthew ever mentions vinyl reissues of listeners’ favourite tunes from their youth.
He doesn’t.
* I’m usually Mr Metric, but I always still say “12 inch single”. I know that countries elsewhere in Europe call them “Maxi-Singles” because they don’t use that system of weights and measures. This is all a bit “Pulp Fiction”, isn’t it?
** Somewhere that sold stationery and greetings cards as well, when I started going there, in a circa-1970 concrete shopping parade next to an outlying group of Liverpool council estates 45 minutes walk from home. Huyton, strangely, didn’t have a record shop!
