Back to business after madness of Record Store Day - Kevin Buckle
Now that the Record Store Day madness is over we can concentrate on the more mundane matter of how active we are online. As I’ve said many times I’m not keen on taking business from other shops by trying to offer something not available in a person’s local record shop but at the same time we do have a lot of things that are either only available from us or are hard to find and not often stocked in other shops.
We did used to sell a lot of local band albums online as you would not expect a shop in Leeds or Cardiff to have in stock an album from a small Scottish band but most of that business has gone to Bandcamp where the artists sell their albums themselves. Unfortunately this does not work out well for the many fans of Scottish music abroad as each album has to be bought individually so the shipping costs are far greater than when somebody could just make one purchase from our website.
We do still get customers in who buy a handful of local band albums but these are normally older albums on compact disc as unfortunately most local bands these days have the misguided notion that they should only release their album on vinyl. It was a huge relief this week when one of our most popular bands and Avalanche favourites There Will Be Fireworks had all their albums delivered to us on CD after a small gap when we had sold out and even the band didn’t have any.
We do get people asking if we have a mailing list so there obviously is a demand for customers being kept updated with what we have but again I’m not keen on bombarding people with emails most of which will not be of interest to them. What I have decided to do is something that is a little more complicated but hopefully worth the effort and that is allow people to register their interests in artists so when we get something we know they might be interested in we can contact them.
This will mostly be focused away from new releases as for instance there aren’t many Foo Fighters fans out there who don’t know there is a Foo Fighters album out this week. However if for instance we got in a hard to find American import Foo Fighters seven inch that might be of interest. We’ll make an announcement about this very soon so fans can start to sign up. As well as artists customers will be able to sign up to Scottish music news in general.
The other thing we will finally get round to is promoting all the Scottish band vinyl we have at great prices with most being £10 or £15 for the likes of Frightened Rabbit, The Fratellis and The View. I bought up a lot of stock from different record companies and labels in readiness for the new shop opening in November planning to have an opening sale but we were then so busy with other things that the idea was postponed. There is a great selection from older bands like Friends Again all the way through to today’s bands like The Snuts and again that will be announced in the next week.