News Record Store Day 2012: In Support Of The Independent Record Store

Record Store Day comes but once a year, and when it comes it brings… well, 300 limited edition records is the same as good cheer, right? This Saturday, the 21st April, for the fifth year running, you’ll find your local independent record store with something they seldom get to see anymore; queues outside their front doors. Originally an American venture, the record collector’s wet dream of a day was bought to the UK by Rough Trade’s Spencer Hickman, who together with a group of like-minded individuals, set about co-ordinating all the releases and events at shops around the country on the third Saturday in April.

But how does someone go about organising an event of this scale? Apparently, the answer is to let the shops just get on with doing what they do best. We had a chat with Kim Bailey, from the Entertainment Retailers Association, who partner Hickman in organising the event, and she suggested that the key to the day was just to let the shops get on with it. “It’s very much about celebrating the individual culture about each of the stores, and the individual personalities of them.” Kim informed us, “Really there’s no central co-ordination, in that we don’t tell the record shops what to do, we want them to decide what events they want to hold, what products they want to stock, and how to engage with their own customers. What we really bring to the party is a central information bank, we let the stores know what is available, we make sure there’s a central resource for the consumers to see what’s available and what record stores are participating, but we really don’t want to create any particular character of it, from a central place.”

“It does make it very hard, but the joy of Record Store Day is that it’s different every shop, so you can go into one store and they might be having a raffle and people baking cupcakes, or in another store you may find a huge band playing on the day, and it’s important that we foster that individuality. There’s no co-ordination in a sense, which makes it more like one huge festival taking place across the whole of the UK. Just with 300 different venues.”

Leaving the stores to organise themselves seems easy enough, but those limited edition records don’t just appear out of thin air. What of the impact on the labels, is it a logistical nightmare for them, getting their artists involved? We grabbed a moment with Michael from Moshi Moshi, whose releases on the day include a special coloured vinyl edition of Slow Club’s ‘Paradise’ album, to find out what the motivates a label to get involved with Record Store Day. “It’s about celebrating something precious, that we want to preserve,” he explains, “It’s about bringing people’s attention to the wonderful world of independent record shops. Showing them what they are about, and hopefully encouraging them to appreciate them, like we do.” Are they ever tempted to cheat and just amend their already scheduled release dates to fit around the date? Michael admits that does occasionally happen; “If we have something scheduled around that time, we might spend more time and money on packaging up, so it’s more special. But more often, it’s a case of coming up with something from scratch.”

If we have the products, lovingly crafted by the bands and labels, and we have the stores, the final piece of the Record Store Day puzzle is those events. This year’s event sees shops up and down the country hosting events as diverse as pressing album covers at Edinburgh’s Avalanche, DJ sets from the likes of The Charlatans’ Tim Burgess at Manchester’s Piccadilly Records, or for those lucky enough to be in Bristol on Saturday, The Duke Spirit, Spectres and an Orlando Weeks Art Exhibition down at Rise. And it’s in events like these that Kim Bailey sees as the future of Record Store Day, and it’s potential to expand further. “Obviously where Record Store Day goes in the future very much depends on the stores that are there,” Kim says, “but what I will say is that Record Store Day is celebrated by the vast majority of shops in the UK, so in terms of numbers of stores participating it can’t really get much bigger, because they’re all already involved. In terms of the number of products, it can’t really get much bigger either, there’s currently between three and four hundred exclusive products on the day, and that’s as much as many of the stores can handle. What can get bigger is the events that take place on the day, and what you’re seeing a lot of more of is those smaller shops that can’t really hold events in the shop itself, instead are holding things in the evening at their local pub, or outside the shop. So I think what we’ll see in future years is just that whole event side of things getting bigger and bigger.”

With the number of independent record shops physically declining at a rate of knots, the importance of the day seems obvious. “Record shops in the UK have certainly been battered in the last few years; ten years ago there were over a thousand record shops around the country, and now we’re down to about 300.” Bailey confirms, “It’s so difficult to have a shop on the high street these days, of any variety, not just a record store and events like Record Store Day are important to make people want these people on their high street, to show that they support them.”

So, if this Saturday is that one day a year when you show your local record shop just how much you love them, think of it as the record shop proprietor’s version of Valentines’ Day. But let’s not treat that shop like an unappreciated partner, ignored in favour of getting our kicks from cheap shiny record porn, available from the comfort of your laptop. No, let’s show our love for those shops every time we want to pick up a record. Let’s make every day Record Store Day.