Record Shops

Not much in the way of new releases during these harsh Summer months. We do have a couple of reviews coming soon but first I want to get on my soapbox.

The news arrived this week that Sister Ray have gone into administration and may have to close. For those that don't know, Sister Ray is a record shop (go to Wikipedia kids) in Berwick Street, London. It used to be Selectadisc which formed part of the TracksandGigs London Record Shop Crawl (which included... Rough Trade Covent Garden, Fopp, (HMV), Selectadisc and Reckless Records), a crawl which has ceased to exist. As recently as ten years ago, my home town of Bedford had two great independent record shops (Andys and Sounds Good To Me), now the only place to buy music in Bedford is WHSmiths and even they seem to be phasing it out.

Its a sad state of affairs and we all know and hate the reasons for it, but what can be done? Probably...not a lot. The record shop as we knew it will die. Rough Trade East and Pure Groove are the last bastions and will go down fighting. In the meantime you, music lover, can do this:-

- Buy from online indy record shops. There are some great ones out there. TracksandGigs supports Norman Records in Leeds and Piccadilly Records in Manchester. Most of the stuff reviewed here are bought from them. Don't give Amazon or HMV your money, they don't need it. If you buy from NR or PR you get a friendly, fast, efficient service and you get a great email every week with lots of recommendations.
Find them here...
www.normanrecords.com
www.piccadillyrecords.com

- Rediscover sound quality. MP3 sounds awful. You know it does, I know it does, sometimes we put up with it but if you buy something on itunes and like it, surely its better to buy it on vinyl or even cd so that you can hear it properly, as the artist intended it to sound, not compressed out of all recognition.

- Don't steal music. If you like the sort of artists that are reviewed on this page, every sale does actually matter to artists like this.

What can record companies do? They seem to be doing very little, but some do and TracksandGigs likes these ideas...

- Some record companies (Secretly Canadian and Jagjaguwar) will give you a free mp3 download of an album when you pre-order it. This is a great idea as it stops people who cannot wait for an album to be released 'needing' to turn to illegal downloads.

- The new Beck album on vinyl comes with a free 320kps high quality download that sounds like it is being played on vinyl, with the sound of the needle hitting the record included. This is one of the best ideas I have ever heard. We all prefer the quality of vinyl, but we like to have an album on our ipods too, so this gives you both and with a neat twist.

In the meantime, lets hope Sister Ray finds a buyer.