I’ve always wanted to have a record shop. I don’t want to sell the music, necessarily – I just like the idea of being surrounded by all those records, talking to the people who come in about albums I like, listening to music, reading books during the quiet times – and maybe having bands do in-store performances on occasion.
It’s the High-Fidelity dream, and I know I’m not the only one with that ambition.
And it’s come true. I finally have my own record shop. It sells vinyl, just like I always imagined it should. Only – it’s not a shop on a High Street. It’s on the internet, and I only have one record in stock. But it’s a good one…
If you follow this blog, you’ll know my friend Owen came and visited so we could go to the Specials gig. He’d put a bit of money and a lot of time and effort into getting an album by Graeme Humphreys and Peter Keen mastered to vinyl.
There are 500 copies (all numbered) and it was cut at Abbey Road studios. It’s lovely. It also happens to be my favourite album of the past five years.
So I said I’d help out how I could. I spoke to Owen about Bandcamp, and they’re handling the digital download side of things. I’m doing sales of the physical record. I have a handful ready to post out within the UK & Europe. Owen’s going to handle delivery of the American ones.
I set up a little online retail outlet where you can listen to the album and buy it, right here on my website. I was quite pleased with how (relatively) straightforward it was. Even wrote a blog post about it on New Music Strategies in the hopes that other people might do something similar.
So – if you have a turntable, and you want to buy a record from what may well be the smallest record store in history (only one item in stock), then it would be very nice to have you visit my shop.
And just as I imagined, I won’t be making any money at it. The full price of the record is going back to the people who made it. This is just me helping out. Let’s face it – I was never going to make money selling records anyway, so why pretend?
In the meantime, I’ll keep reading my book and listening to music. You go ahead and browse.
