I was going to start this newsletter on another subject, but the other day I was drawn to this tweet about a reissue of Blur’s Parklife on sale in HMV for £59.99. (This is my first newsletter by the way, so bear with me if it’s clunky, and any feedback is much appreciated. I’m going to aim to do these weekly, but might miss the odd one here or there.)
https://x.com/CheapIndieVinyl/status/1716787367854432549?s=20
Full disclosure: I spent six years working in the Trocadero branch of HMV from 2007 until it’s closure in 2013. Four of those years were wonderful, about as fun as you could imagine a retail environment, with a like minded bunch of music-loving colleagues who nurtured, challenged and grew my own music taste. The less said about the last two years, as the company attempted to starve off administration, by employing staff without any real passion for music, film or gaming as cheaply as possible the better.
Anyway. That £60 Blur record. At first look, that’s an absolutely insane price for a double LP. Sixty pounds. Parklife. It’s not even Blur’s best record, although I guess it’s on the Britpop Mount Rushmore (what else would you have on there? Definitely Maybe, Different Class, Parklife, Urban Hymns, Everything Must Go? Ladies & Gentlemen should be up there, but it’s probably not Britpop enough). Looking around it seems to be about £45 everywhere else, which is still far too expensive for a repressing of a ‘legacy’ album - I don’t know what the dealer price on it will be (about £30 if I’d hazard a guess) but I know that HMV will get a nice discount on that, and almost certainly on consignment terms too (ie. they’ll only pay the distributor for it when it sells), all factors which make that worse.
There used to be a stereotype of the ‘fifty pound man’ who’d come into HMV (or Virgin Megastores/Zavvi/Our Price) and drop £50 every week or month on new release CDs and LPs. We had numerous customers who’d spend double or treble that, and would have had pretty enviable vinyl/CD collections as a result. I’m not sure £50 man really exists any more, or at least not as many of them do. Those that do tend to be more attuned with the economics of music buying and in my experience at least will be doing their buying from Indies or Bandcamp. With only a third of the number of stores as there was in it’s 1990’s heydey, HMV doesn’t even have the convenience of being in all major towns any more, and in any case Amazon will deliver the same record to you for free, and cheaper to boot.
Indie record shops have really upped their customer experiences since the original demise of HMV - of course the curmudgeonly record shop owner still exists, but in most cases stores are clean, well laid out and offer a decent coffee for whilst you’re browsing. Some now offer live events and in-stores. Since COVID the majority have embraced e-commerce and set up decent websites. HMV should be taking this as a warning, for all the noise in the press about a focus on vinyl and massive shops full of it, no one is going to shop there if the same product is a fiver less down the road. It had always been expensive, but it always had the fact it was a decent retail environment and convenient to save it - it’s lost both those factors now as the handful of stores left seem to be as much about selling pop-culture toys and t-shirts as it is about selling music.
Is there a place left for HMV on the high street? I’d like to think so, but it needs to be better. I can’t remember the last time I bought anything from there (or Fopp for that matter, which is basically the same as HMV these days). The fact is, for major labels and larger indies, HMV remains the only place to scale out a release nationwide, and although there’s a tonne of logistical issues in the way now (there’s no longer a central warehouse so orders have to be sent to stores individually, which isn’t always cost effective) they do still get footfall and offer visibility for a release as part of a bigger campaign. Whether it’s good value for money for a label to promote a record there is a different matter, and that’s something only the label can decide (although my personal opinion is that money would be spent better elsewhere, unless it’s a really mainstream album).
If anything HMV’s biggest legacy is that it forced indie record stores to improve, making the record shopping experience better for everyone, but by following this all-things-to-all-men strategy of being a one-stop pop culture shop and losing it’s core focus as a music (and film) shop then I can only see it going the way of Woolworths, which will be a massive shame.
Glass of Dutch Wine?
I recently returned from Amsterdam where I attended the annual Amsterdam Dance Event. For those who don’t know what ADE is, it’s essentially a large industry conference with a festival tacked on in hundreds of venues across the city. For me it’s mostly a chance to catch up with friends and peers rather than get into any clubbing, although plenty also go purely for the events side of things.
It’s an intense four days of back to back meetings and mixers, but amongst the madness I managed to find a spare hour to visit a few of the cities record shops, coming back with a nice pile of tunes that I perhaps wouldn’t have picked up in London. I think being in an unfamiliar location, and meeting and chatting music with people all day long can really re-focus why we do this. Whatever the genre I’ve never met anyone in the industry who isn’t totally passionate about music, and whilst there is more than a fair share of frustrations in this game I think everyone appreciates how fortunate they are to be working with something they love every day. Coming out of a meeting or record shop with my mind opened to something new or a fresh appreciation of a group/artist I’d not considered before is as much of a buzz as having a hit record or getting a load of New Music Fridays on release day.
I’ve put some of the things I’ve discovered or been listening to lately into the below Spotify playlist, and there’s also a Buy Music Club link with some bonus stuff that isn’t streaming below that. It’s not all new music, nor is it all dance music, and some of it you’ll probably know already but I hope you enjoy it regardless.
The Voice Actor record is something I missed the first time it came out, purely because at 110 tracks it wasn’t something I found myself with the time to dive into. It’s now been compiled as a shorter 16 track version, the highlight of which is Pelli - starting off sounding like a distant dream in a mixture of French & English it slowly descends into a nightmare as snippets of emergency radio broadcasts from 9/11 emerge from the haze.
The album from Armand Hammer & co is one of my favourite rap albums of the year, standing out in a sea of auto-tune, whilst the new Lee Gamble has been on repeat for almost a week now. I also want to shout out the new Athens of the North Street Soul compilation that I’ve shared the Bo’vel track from, as that’s a great primer of an often-overlooked genre. There’s a load of other bits in here I’ve not got space to go into in detail, but it’s all worth checking out, I assure you.