Record Stores A.D. (After Digital)

Hi Record Stores. I’m happy about your day, that it’s worked out so well, that people were lining up around the block and many of you posted the strongest sales days in the history of your stores. I’m happy that reports of your death have been greatly exaggerated. I’m grateful that many of you have found creative ways to bring in more revenue, be it through novelties, books, Japanese sodas, etc.

Sit down with me. I have to lay some honesty down on you. I know things have been tough with less money, less attention, fewer sales reps. I see you out there hustling for that big label co-op money. I see you struggling to get your buying done, to push your social networking, to budget and manage your inventory. I know you’re pressing distributors and labels to lower prices so you can compete with digital. Times are hard, but we’ve all got to change. Record Store Day aside (and, yeah, we’re going to talk about RSD one of these days soon), most of the changes made at stores have been reactive instead of proactive. Reactive is often how the bigger side of the industry deals with things – “Digital? Run there!” – given their well-documented conservatism regarding everything from new formats to, I don’t know, listing costs on packing slips. But adopting a reactive strategy without an eye towards evolution is very much selling yourselves – and everything you can do that digital can’t - short. The lines have sure been blurred between major and indie, but the biggest distinction is the way we develop acts. You want some love from your indie labels? I’m here for you. I’ve been thinking about you for a long, long time now and I’ve been thinking about how much I need you and how much I want things to be right between us. It’s going to take a little work, but we’re tied together, you and me. We can do this together. If your store is doing better than ever year round, then feel free to tell me to take my new-fangled ideas and shove them. For the rest of you – which is to say most of you – you have to change.

Last year, prior to being hired to run Spindle when I was just the Absolutely Kosher guy, I read the NYT bestseller “Switch: How To Change Things When Change is Hard” by Fast Company columnists Chip & Dan Heath. Nobody’s written “Street Date: How to Save the Record Store” yet, so the title alone appealed to me. How much harder could things be for labels like mine or the stores who traditionally developed our bands & records with us? The book outlines three spheres in which to recognize and experiment with change: the elephant, the rider and the path. That is to say the id (your gut feeling/cravings/natural inclinations), the superego (your logical, reasoned mind), and the environment of the people involved (in our case, either the music business as a whole or even just your store, depending on how you choose to examine it). It’s a great book, but don’t expect an easy solution to your woes within its pages. In fact, don’t expect that from anywhere. There isn’t one solution. There are fifty or more, but none of them is the panacea, the catch-all, cure-all savior you’ve been praying for. And because life after digital is complex enough and demands that you do more than one thing differently than you already do them, I might lose at least half of you before I finish this blog post. But still, a fella’s got to try.

This blog and the efforts of Spindle Music very much aspire to be the serialized version of “Street Date: How to Save the Record Store” or whatever else you’d title it. I’d like to write it with you, Record Stores. Our tools, all of which have been designed with careful consideration for your workflow, and all the info about our records will be behind the account log-in because we want to recognize you as professionals with the privileges of esteemed membership, but I’m hoping to keep this blog in front of it. If you’d like things to get even a little bit better and are willing to work with us to make that happen, let’s do this. Next blog post: Why any Record Store clerk is better for your customers than the digital juggernaut.