Never mind the record shops it’s all about algorithms - Kevin Buckle

For me it was a follow up to my recent trip to London when I met with ERA, who organised the Manchester meeting and also organise Record Store Day, as well as Domino Records, home to the Arctic Monkeys and Wet Leg among many others.

Wet Leg

I also visited Cargo Independent, one of the main distributors of independent records and the offices of the Beggars Group, which has many of the independent labels people remember, best such as Rough Trade, 4AD and Matador, as the owner, Martin Mills, has a habit of rescuing struggling independent labels in the same way he rescued Rough Trade the shop when it was about to close.

ERA are the Entertainment Retail Association who started off as an organisation for record shops but now include anybody in entertainment from Spotify to Amazon.

The biggest thing to come out of all these meetings was the labels and record companies’ obsession with the first week of sales of an album trying to get as high a chart placing as possible, normally by doing deals with a few shops to cram sales into that first week by offering incentives to pre- order the album.

Don’t get me wrong, it was always a priority for a record company to get as high a chart placing as possible in the first week, but that was mainly to drive sales in the second week and beyond.

If a less well known band could make the top 20 or 30, that would mean the shops that had not stocked the album would reconsider and that, of course, then boosted the sales in the second week.

Also unlike now, when almost nobody pays attention to the album chart, in earlier times the public would see an album by an artist they hadn’t heard of and consider investigating further.

In those pre-internet days that was far more difficult and would mean customers looking out for reviews or interviews or hoping to hear something on the radio.

Now no matter how well an album has done, the physical sales in the second week are nearly always dreadful and at Monday’s meeting it became clear why.

It turns out they don’t care at all whether customers come into shops asking for the album, all they want is to influence the algorithms that fuel the “network effect”, which AI tells me “is a phenomenon where a product, service or platform becomes more valuable as more people use it.”

Record companies are creatures of habit and I should add they all tend to behave like each other too, so they now all have a model in which they get as high as possible a chart placing in week one and then rely on digital sales.

Luckily for shops, back catalogue is king, because if they were dependent on new releases, few would survive.