We've never had it so good....

Woebot

Well-known member
It looks like my local store Golden Grooves is shutting down.

We came across the owner the other night emptying the store in shopping market trolleys.

"Trade's really bad, they've put the rent up and I'm going to have to shut the shop down", he said "I'm going to stash these in my basement and sell them on the net"

This year will always go down on record for me as the year the Second-hand record store died. Its a tragedy.

But on the other hand if you visit eBay or GEMM the whole place is filled with those self-same boutiques selling their stock. It occurred to me that the proclivity and deep availability of music, I mean you can literally get ANYTHING you want must have benefitted from this implosion of the second-hand stores into the web.

All the stock is there! And you can search it. If you'd been to any one of those shops you might have been able to get one or other thing you were trying to find, but as it is, as a swollen organism, now everything is findable at the press of a button.

I mean how many times have you bothered to search through an entire online boutiques stock via eBay or GEMM? You don't, you cherry pick.

However, conversely it strikes me that the maintenance and availability of these vaste databases of records isn't something that can continue indefinitely. I mean, the rewards we're reaping now, the conditions which have made that possible will change quite rapidly. For one thing as these stores go out of business, keeping the stock available will gradually become impossible. Quantities such as these, well people can't stash them under their beds, and it takes manpower to manage these record sales businesses, manpower which stores must be finding is scantily rewarded. How many records COULD an individual shop actually sell in these conditions?

Anyway, my theory is that quite soon, in lieu of conglomerates arriving and rounding up all this stock into huge acutely-catalogued warehouses, quite soon we'll find the "deep" availability will evaporate. In short, if it's rare, and you want it, but it now.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
a quite famous record store in Nyc, Footlights -- soundtracks, musicals, show tunes etc -- it has a largely gay clientele -- is going out of business, on account of drastic hike in rent costs -- or more precisely, it is becoming a web-only business

they are selling off most of their stock as insanely low prices ( for some reason they have quite a bit of rock'n'pop'n'other, i picked up two Tomita albums, Peter hammill's 'fool's mate', a Tangerine Dream double live album, and Abba's the Visitors, for, like nothing)

the 'where do they store their stock' thing doesnt seem like a huge problem, though -- presumably stores can operate out of storage units in a storage center on the periphery of towns -- the cost of renting those is so much vastly smaller than renting in a street with good passing trade -- whenever i go in my storage unit in london there's people in there operating mail order businesses from in there

with ebay, the net, etc, the idea of finding exactly what you want, like, that, has its appeals, for sure

BUT, matt, don't you feel there's a sort of Protestant Work Ethic cum Epiphany aspect to the drudgery and dusty toil of going through a store's stacks and then YIPPEE, finding something you're after. like you've somehow earned it. and also there's the suspense element. that RUSH aspect is gone with the online shopping

also, with browsing, there's the finding something you didn't know you wanted, or something you didn't even know existed, aspect

i've been meaning to write a "I love Record Stores' thing on the blogg for a while, maybe i should do it now and give it an elegaic slant

although there's still a lot of used record stores in the east village, a couple of new ones just opened in fact
 

qwerty south

no use for a witticism
mr bongos in london's soho shut down this year due to an increase in rent to around 100,000 pounds a year for their 'house'.
 
C

captain easychord

Guest
this subject reminds of a morgan geist interview where he talked about the consolidation of rare italo records in the hands of a few hardcore collectors.... effectively removing them from the supply chain supported by second hands stores. the whole getting put under the bed thing.
 

soundslike1981

Well-known member
Occasionally I miss browsing, now living in a small city with few real surprises in the shops.

But ultimately, this is one area where I will definitely forgo some of the romanticism of "the hunt" in the flesh for the ability to get exactly what I want and not waste time on filler records. When you're on limited funds (and or time) it's great to never feel burned, just buying exactly what you want. And I may miss out on that one-in-twenty surprise payoff of taking a chance on something unheard/unvouched, but given that I'm finding 20-in-20 "yes, I like this" rates, my total amount of time I could possibly spend listening is about full up anyway.

Is it possible that the internet is actually allowing the small shops--now virtual rather than physical--to hedge back in against the HMVs and the Towers that starting shutting out the physical mom'n'pops before the internet? Are things like Amazon's "marketplace" a good thing or a bad thing, in regards to the small/independent/specialty/marginalia sellers? Yes, the big evil globalcorp-o-ramas are taking a cut--but are the small sellers getting better exposure/distribution than they ever could have done before?
 

soundslike1981

Well-known member
captain easychord said:
this subject reminds of a morgan geist interview where he talked about the consolidation of rare italo records in the hands of a few hardcore collectors.... effectively removing them from the supply chain supported by second hands stores. the whole getting put under the bed thing.


This is the main reason I'm all for the distribution of O.O.P. (and likely to stay that way till interest is drummed up) vinyl via peer-to-peer services--the stuff has either been horded or lost to the point that in many instances, if you can find it now, it's only for unreasonable prices. Maybe this is unethical, though.
 

don_quixote

Trent End
i absolutely adore record shops and i definitely agree with blissbloggers sentiments regarding coming across something you didnt know you wanted.

my favourite record shops are the ones i pick visits to, and always expect to find something that suprises me through being there, one that you can lose yourself in, or has the most awkward organisational system anywhere and has weird genre definitions and you dont know what youre looking for where.

however, this obviously isnt very prosperous

my current favourite is jumbo records in leeds, where i was looking through the cds and wasnt very impressed, then i switched to the vinyl and was finding arthur russell and liquid liquid and i was blown away. i think i was more blown away (although im not entirely sure this is grammatically acceptable) by the lack of order in the record selection on offer.

slightly pricey, though i wasnt too bothered.
 

Brokeman

Living Too Late
I'd take a dusty vinyl shop over a searchable database any day of the week. I love the scum (is it dust & sweat?) that is left on my fingers after a thorough perusal of the racks.

BUT, there's just nothing in the shops over here most of the time, especially if you're buying Grime outside of London. So I spend my time discovering the joys of a well-organized web-shop with all the tracks on a 12" listed, a catalogue number and nice mp3 samples.

On thing about GEMM to remember however is that many of the items listed are not actually there anymore. It depends on how integrated the seller's inventory system is; I've ordered more than a few items only to find out that they haven't been in stock for years.

My personal favourite web-shopping moments:

1) finding a rare track with a spelling mistake in the title so that no one has stumbled across it yet (this is especially good when it happens on eBay).

2) finding some record shop online that used to sell Garage in 2000 or so and has since stopped carrying it cause it never sold. I recently found new copies of Creeper and Pulse X sitting in an online shop from small-town Canada.
 

Woebot

Well-known member
blissblogger said:
BUT, matt, don't you feel there's a sort of Protestant Work Ethic cum Epiphany aspect to the drudgery and dusty toil of going through a store's stacks and then YIPPEE, finding something you're after. like you've somehow earned it. and also there's the suspense element. that RUSH aspect is gone with the online shopping

of course you're right. i suspect its precisely that which feeds the addiction of record-shopping itself. i've found recently i'm spending less (er, well slightly less) than i was when in the shops the whole time.

its extremely rare i actually find anything im looking for though. what tends to happen in shops is that i come across things i may have loosely earmarked as being of possible interest. for instance, the other day i came across the syreeta lp (which i could have found like INSTANTLY online), Syreeta being stevie wonder's bird and the lp is produced by the tonto's expanding head band blokes. thought it was going to be one of those soul/electronica weirdities like the Timmy Thomas LP (grand tradition spearding up to Brandy's full moon).

so it caught me off guard rather pleasantly, forced me to check it out. (didnt pick it up incidentally cos it was rather disappointing)

but anyway the point is that i wouldnt find the Bal Pare LP (something i'm DESPERATLEY looking for) in a record store. theres no point even trying, even if i was in Hamburg/Berlin. so that knowledge kinda negates the charm of record stores, when you know the activity is slightly futile.
 

Gabba Flamenco Crossover

High Sierra Skullfuck
There are still going to be lots of record shops in obscure high streets in the suburbs, nestled in between the charity shops (goodwills if your a yank) and takeaways - because supermarkets and out of town shopping have emptied out the lots and caused a glut of available shop space, meaning it's as cheap to rent space there as it would be in a storage unit plus theres the benefit of some passing trade.

I used to live in the deadzone between croydon and beckenham in south london and there are loads of 2nd hand record shops round there. Most of them do their business on-line and at record fairs and any trade they get into the shop itself is a nice bonus.

The flipside of the coin of course is that if your in Soho you've really got to make it work - and I'm not suprised bongos is shutting. Selectadisc is on the way out to I hear.

I never buy stuff online (apart from downloads), it feels wrong. I'm a believer in serendipity in record shopping. Silly old fool that i am.
 

henry s

Street Fighting Man
...not to mention the lovable smarminess of record store clerks...(which of course can be problematic, as you start to develop a bit of a rapport with them, and then feel guilty if you leave without buying anything...at least I do)...

I could spend an hour diggin thru a record shop, come out empty-handed, and still feel sated...
 

Logan Sama

BestThereIsAtWhatIDo
Isn't the whole point of going to 2nd Hand record stores to be that you know/own all the records you end up digging through when you go in?
 

Canada J Soup

Monkey Man
Thinking about the joy of stumbling across rare records in unexpected locations, it occurred to me that my most serendipitous finds over the last few years have occurred when buying directly from people having moving sales or making space. It's probably 'cause I tend to go straight to GEMM when looking for something specific that'll only be available second hand...which means less time browsing through racks that might contain something unlooked for.

Living in a densely populated urban area with a Craigslist is obviously a factor, but I've found some real gems: seriously classic electro, house and techno 12s from the late 80s / early 90s in pristine condition for $1 each (as punted by a DJ with a preference for classic rock, more record club memberships than his apartment could cope with and no inclination to find out what that 'dance shit' was actually worth). Several crates of LPs priced at $5 for 10 (sold by a woman who was moving across country and realized that she hadn't owned a turntable since the early 90s). Low expectations + might-as-well-give-it-away pricing = euphoric light-headedness as you walk away with 20 records you'd never thought you'd own in a stack under your arm.
 
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