Record Store Day: The relevance – or otherwise – of the physical music product

Though it might feel as if it’s been around forever, Record Store Day in fact only launched in 2007, a time when physical sales of music were lower than a Leonard Cohen cough.

Its ambassadors were Metallica, who’ve riled against the Internet’s increasing dominance of the musical business ever since the invention of Napster singlehandedly limited their last two records to selling a mere eight million copies, but don’t let that put you off – Record Store Day is brilliant, like Christmas, but with even more records.

Record Store Day’s raison d’être seems to me to be twofold; get people excited about records, and get people excited about record shops. And it works. I fucking love Record Store Day. It’s the only time I get up before midday on a weekend unless there’s a fire, eager to queue with friends outside shops hours before they’ve even opened in the hope that I get to spend lots of money on limited edition runs of things I don’t need. And I don’t even have to feel bad about wasting the cash ‘til like, Sunday, because it really feels like you’re part of something, and part of something good. Once again, the number of shiny things I’m hoping to come to own this year is higher than the number of ambitions I have in my life, and for a little while on Saturday morning will seem infinitely more important too.

Retailers, labels, artists and fans alike seem in agreement that something about the current music business is unsustainable. Those involved in Record Store Day do their bit to address the parts of it they’re able to by putting the excitement back in to record shopping, both in offering products that are once in a lifetime buys and in making the shops more thrilling than any HMV has been in living memory. Gigs, signings, band members working behind the tills – participating shops on Saturday will be a great place to spend a day, regardless of whether you’re picking up any music (but, y’know, do).

Yet even in the friendliest of outlets, buying actual copies of records on any normal day simply isn’t that exciting any longer, which is perhaps why the products themselves are increasingly appealing to shrinking circles of prehistoric geeks. Those who hold physical formats closest to their hearts are often thought of as folks who are “all about the music, man”, but in reality they’re anything but. So much of the charm of record collecting is completely non-musical, and shops would do well to appeal to this side of these curious creatures.

The fun is in collection building, in artwork, in the fetishisation of the alphabet. It’s rummaging around shops; it’s the joy of unwrapping something or taking it out of its box. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the way we live, in the same way there’s nothing immoral about having an erotic fixation on shoes. But shoe fetishists and record collectors have another thing in common – neither calling is first and foremost about music.

Sure, there’s an even smaller group who swear by the idea that music sounds better on vinyl, and they have a point. They also probably have a very expensive turntable, some very nice speakers, and a collection full of the kind of vinyl you can’t easily pick up in the RSPCA shop on North London’s Blackstock Road. I’d argue such folks are vastly outnumbered these days by people browsing the Internet for new MP3s, Soundcloud streams or YouTube clips, and I’d further posit that this newer species are just as much about “the music” as I am, pedalling down to Flashback on my Penny Farthing. One of the things that keeps me excited about music is that there will always be something that scares me, and people younger than me who disagree and want to hear it, regardless of the medium it reaches them in. How do shops, and the music business at large, keep them happy? It’s an important issue to address, as these people are invariably younger than the people who are selling them the music. They’re going to live longer than you, record retailers. Pay them attention, and they might pay you money.

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I’ve got my record collection and I want to add to it, every day, and so debilitating is the addiction that it’s currently stopping me owning even one shoe without a small hole in it, somewhere. But if I didn’t, why would I start one in 2013? Why would a younger person bother buying a physical copy of anything? It’s more expensive, it takes up space, and it’ll only be outmoded in a few years anyway. If like me you’re a man in your mid twenties (OK, late twenties) you’ll have lived through lots of shifts in format. Each time it’s likely you’ll have become rather attached to the most recent one – your tapes, your minidiscs, your CDs, and now the contents of your iTunes – and yet, as each one took over, didn’t the previous seem less and less important, comical even? Don’t kid yourself that this won’t happen again. What’ll transpire, do you reckon, if for example Apple develop a new format that renders your current iTunes collection completely obsolete? It might sound apocalyptic, but given the amount of money spent on iTunes per year, wouldn’t it actually be a stroke of genius on Apple’s part – making you buy things you already own, again? CDs had pretty much exactly the same effect when they first arrived. It’d be naïve to think that any format is future proof when there’s money to be made by proving otherwise.

Of course, in the face of such an apocalypse I would still have my vinyl, but as I’ve explained, I’m keeping that because I’m a nerd, not for insurance reasons. For me, the medium of the vinyl is tied up with the message of the music, of course. But I’ve lived through enough format shifts in my lifetime to know that they’re not the same thing. It’s the message that needs protecting, not the medium. Anyone with a Kindle will back me up. Sure, if my house were to go up in flames, my record collection would be the thing I’d miss most (assuming my family got out safe – they’re a resourceful bunch). But music’s appeal is more ethereal than its mere worldly form. If the round things I had lined up in my living room didn’t make a noise when I put a needle on them, I wouldn’t be bothered in ooh… most of them (some of them look better than they sound, in honesty).

Like the records themselves, the stores have a place in my heart, and anything like Record Store Day that helps the best ones survive gets all of my thumbs pointing up. The news that Rough Trade has had another great year in a row made me smile, and I hope they and all other indies rake it in this RSD. But in honesty I’ve always felt more of an attachment to artists than I have the labels that release their music, the stores that sell it, or the format it’s sold on. What we need is to find a way for the people who are making the music to get a fairer deal, to stop the people who are making the music getting the least rewarding financial cut from the selling of a copy of it. Then hopefully they’ll keep making it for us. And so long as it reaches me, I’ll be happy. If it happens to be via a gatefold double 180gsm 12” translucent yellow vinyl with a fourth side of artwork hand etched by the band, well… I can’t wait to alphabetise the bastard.