As threatened, throughout April - in celebration of Record Store Day - I offer up a daily post related to all things record shop.
And if any of it sounds like a Manifesto, consider it good practice for my election campaign next year.
Day Fifteen of this steaming pile of japery, kinghell boring bullshit and contentious nonsense...
15/04/22
The Worm Has Turned And It's Eating It's Own Head
With The Big Day only 8 days away I've been thinking (probably way more than I should) about how best to navigate this year's RSD 'event'.
In the years (B)efore (C)ovid I would book bands to play in the shop on RSD. In 2015 BC, I organised a mini RSD festival outside the Custard Factory shop because I had a ready-made stage and a sound system and two fairly local bands, God Damn and Baby Godzilla - putting out an RSD collaboration record. In the end I had something like 6 or 7 bands playing on the day, and a couple of hundred people got to watch great bands playing for free. It was the stuff that local legends are made of.
I tried to program similar RSD instores in the Shrewsbury shop, utilizing the 'live' room above the shop but it didn't work. As great as the bands were, punters just weren't prepared to climb the stairs and watch a band for free when there were RSD records to rummage through downstairs; the bands graciously gave up their time to travel to the shop and then ended up playing to an empty room. Even (B)efore (C)ovid, I'd decided to knock RSD instores on the head.
This RSD I won't have any bands playing in the shop. Use it or lose it in full effect, I guess.
Something else I won't be doing this year, after much deliberation, is pre-publishing a list of all the RSD titles I've got in for the day. The way I've come to look at it over the past few weeks is that if you're requiring a list of the RSD records I've got before you decide to visit the shop, you're probably not the sort of person who is heading to their local record shop to support the shop; you're looking for a product that you'd just as easily buy off Amazon if Amazon had them on sale on Saturday morning.
The biggest issue that RSD faces is that for too many people, the event is no longer seen as a celebration of the independent record shop. It's a platform for distributors to put out records, and the industry - and perhaps the shops themselves - have lost their way.
So, no pre-published list, except for the early birds in the queue to use at 8am who'll have their orders picked by me & James as per usual. No live music. BUT, loads and loads of markdowns. SKIP DIPPERS ON STEROIDS I'm calling it. One day only, natch.
And in the RSD aftermath (post-June 18th when the RSD titles that haven't made it for RSD allegedly land) I'm going to go searching for that which was lost. Uryens, I will not fail you.