Record Store Day - a few thoughts

Having started this blog 12 months ago by writing about an LP I bought as part of Record Store Day, it seems a little perverse to now admit that I didn't go along this year.

Record Store Day is, of course, a wonderful thing, celebrating an unique culture and encouraging people to make the effort to head off to their local independent record shop. Last year I would have ended that sentence with 'while they still can' but with the number of UK indie record shops having actually increased by 12 in the last year after more than a decade of precipitous decline, a corner has hopefully been turned.

Anyway, I was off to London at 8am to see Man City beat their Traffordian neighbours at Wembley, so I had to sit this one out.

With nearly all of the exclusive product sold by the 180 UK shops involved coming in vinyl form, it was disappointing to miss out but a couple of things have been nagging at me.

First of all, there's the product. Dozens of exclusive, limited-edition items sounds great in principle but dig through the actual list and quite a bit of it felt a little underwhelming.

There's an avalanche of alternative takes, live versions, straight-up reissues (occasionally in new packaging) and remixes, many of them on 7-inch singles - all pretty essential if you're an obsessed fan of a band (and we've all been there) but otherwise fairly missable. No doubt the Radiohead outtakes 12-inch sold out in moments but the 2 tracks still weren't good enough to get on what was already a patchy album.

I'd certainly be interested to find out how popular the individually numbered 500-strong vinyl run of Gorillaz' The Fall album was at over £20 a pop when it was available as a free download at Christmas.

Needless to say, there was still plenty of things I wanted to buy - singles by Red Krayola and Moon Duo, the Dave Depper Ram Project LP, Lone Pigeon's 28 Secret Tracks, most of the Ace/Vanguard reissues and Earth's Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light for a start.

But then comes the issue of whether you'll actually get your hands on the stuff you want. Last year I headed off to Vibes Records in Bury (now sadly defunct - Vibes that is, not Bury) and picked up the Flaming Lips' Dark Side of the Moon before driving into Manchester hoping to get hold of a couple of limited edition singles only to find over 200 people waiting outside the door of Piccadilly Records, some of them since the early hours of the morning.

Then there's the problem with so much of the really popular stuff ending up on eBay by lunchtime. It's got to be a little heartbreaking as the struggling owner of a record shop to sell the Radiohead Supercollider 12-inch at £6-7 on the day and then watch it go for ten times that on eBay (Buy Now price on eBay at time of writing £66.99 + postage! A total of 39 for sale, just shy of 2% of every copy made). The temptation to keep a couple back and eBay them yourself must be considerable.

Anyway, let's be honest here, I'm just not used to queuing in record shops - any other day of the year you can go in, peruse at your leisure, listen to a couple of things on the provided turntables and ask the helpful staff any questions, all without waiting your turn to get near the racks or suffering the sharp elbows of fellow browsers. Record shops are usually like libraries with a great soundtrack, rather than a visit to Stockport market.

I guess my point here is that RSD is a great idea, a wonderful way to give struggling independents a financial boost and some welcome publicity, but I'm not quite as sorry to sit this one out as I expected. You'll catch me in a record shop on plenty of other weekends, after all. Besides which, I still managed to buy a copy of the Earth LP on green vinyl online from Norman Records a few days after, so I appear to be blessed all round at the moment.