Good year at Avalanche with sales of vinyl still rising

The Taylor Swift x Butcher Billy exhibition in the Waverley Market secret stairs spaceThe Taylor Swift x Butcher Billy exhibition in the Waverley Market secret stairs space
The Taylor Swift x Butcher Billy exhibition in the Waverley Market secret stairs space
It has been a good year at Avalanche and it has certainly been interesting to see the sales of vinyl continue to rise, when if I’m honest I was expecting a slump in sales by now, if for no other reason than the price which I thought was unsustainable.

We don’t discount but do charge what was considered at one point in the music industry a fair margin, but it now seems that for many that margin has increased. When we are selling albums at £40 or even £50 plus and customers are saying that is the cheapest price they have seen it does make me wonder.

I know that in the old days HMV would make a higher margin saying they had to pay for a head office to run things, and as vinyl sales dropped they also charged extra for it being a premium product though I never quite knew what that meant.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Now however I see some indies charging the same high prices and as far as I can tell still getting sales. I’ve never been keen on charging more for a limited edition, that if truth be told does not cost the record label more, which is often the case with coloured vinyl.

Again signed copies used to cost the same as the regular version of an album, whether that was vinyl or CD and was aimed at getting early sales for a release and a high midweek chart position on the back of which a label could promote the album further. In the case of smaller bands they could then convince what were then the big players, HMV and Virgin, to take an album they had initially refused to stock.

There are too many shops spending their time trying to convince potential customers by email and on social media that they have some special version that nobody else has. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes this is in fact the case, but if so all the record label has done is give one shop an advantage over all the others when often the artist in the past has relied on those other shops for support.

I long ago gave up caring and have gone down a different route trying to give fans something a little different by working with artists to produce interesting merchandise. What I did decide against was tying anything we have to the release of an album and creating sales that way.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

The Taylor Swift x Butcher Billy exhibition – still on at Waverley Market – has been a huge success, but none of the merchandise that goes with it has been tied to the album release which would have been an easy thing to do when the recent Anthology edition was released.

Of course it isn’t just shops trying to gain an advantage with an exclusive version and most of the time it is the artists and their labels offering fans something not available in shops. The problem with this is that there is no incentive now for a shop to help break a band as you can be sure that come the next album the fanbase the shop has helped create will be targeted directly. I’m just glad we have found a successful way of doing things that customers seem to appreciate.

Related topics:
News you can trust since 1873
Follow us
©National World Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved.Cookie SettingsTerms and ConditionsPrivacy notice