As if by magic Taylor appears again for RSD - Kevin Buckle

Mr Benn The Music

It is Record Store Day today and for the second year running Taylor Swift is leading the field when it comes to interest in the hundreds of releases.

Though I wasn’t overly impressed with this year’s list of releases I have in fact ended up stocking considerably more than normal as though there are few big hitters with The 1975, The Cure and U2 joining Taylor there is an awful lot of OK stuff. Lots of releases we will take small numbers on but the sheer volume of releases means that soon mounts up.

Of course the idea behind Record Store Day has long mbeen lost and with barely a week going by these days without a slew of limited edition vinyl being released I would actually prefer to have, as I have said before, a wide range of limited edition merchandise be that t- shirts, posters, prints or the many other kinds of promotional items still popular.

The simple idea behind Record Store Day when it started was to get people back into visiting shops and there was no need for that to be all focused around vinyl the way it is now.

Taylor Swift

The truth is all the big players weren’t really bothered about selling vinyl at the time so were prepared to see independent shops have their exclusives but now of course things are very different. In fact the vast majority of fans now may turn up on the big day but the next week will be back online ordering limited editions from their favourite artists that shops do not have.

It can be useful for new shops to raise their profile and for some of the bigger shops to make some much needed cash by ironically making most of their sales online once the short embargo on internet sales is lifted.

However at Avalanche we try to stick to the original premise of only ordering as much as we think we will

sell in the shop and then just using online sales to mop up any titles that have not sold through as well as expected.

Despite all the cynicism there are always one or two releases that make me smile and this year the release of all the music from the children’s television series Mr Benn on picture disc hit the spot. There will always be a selection of cult and horror movie soundtracks on offer but for collectors of TV and movie soundtracks this will be a must.

I suspect that unlike the kids putting their Taylor Swift picture discs on their wall most buyers will have their Mr Benn vinyl safely stashed in a cupboard to be brought out and played on special occasions.

In the end I suppose what really matters is if both sets of fans are happy then all is well. Record Store Day itself is in need of a massive revamp and this year Waverley Market and Avalanche are hosting the Scottish regional meeting to discuss how things went and what can maybe be done next year so you can be sure I’ll be doing all I can to move the focus away from vinyl and back to attracting people into shops with a wider variety of offerings and entertainment.