24 MusicWeek 03.08.12 RETAIL
www.musicweek.com
Owner: Jason Moore RETROBLOKE
Give us a brief history of the store… I was working as a credit controller in St Albans and after years of daydreaming finally found the courage to leave and open my own record shop in Hendon, north London. It used to be a furniture store and originally opened with the name Promo, which was a silly name choice because people assumed we specialised in dance promo releases, when in reality we stocked all genres of music. That said, I’m not sure Retrobloke is much better.
How is business today compared to when you first started and over the years? Terrible! It took us a few years to get established, but our shop did well until the mid-2000s. Since then we’ve been in
steady decline – around a 10% drop in turnover every year – and this year has been the toughest yet. Due to high London rents we now struggle
to break even on a weekly basis, but we’re still clinging on. In June we ran a promotion giving up to 50% off all items in the store, simply by saying a code word given on our Facebook page. We couldn’t believe it, but nobody took us up on the offer.
What was Record Store Day like for you this year? Record Store Day isn’t something that benefits us. We’re a bit out of the way – you have to make an effort to get to us. To be honest, seeing the displays and big pushes in our local HMV store confirms that Record Store Day is no longer about giving benefit to independent stores.
Is there anything else that the music industry could do to help indie retailers? The industry should use independent shops to promote releases while they’re still here. We’re the kind of
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wretrobloke.com
“It’s not about our stock, or our prices. It’s about the amount of people coming through the door” JASON MOORE, RETROBLOKE
shop that attracts truly dedicated record buyers, the hardcore vinyl collectors. They’re the people who’ll cherish special editions, but having the resources to provide a broad range of the latest releases is tough for shops like us, particularly when margins are tight. Give us the opportunity and
we’ll sell and promote music to the kind of obsessives who’ll then buy everything they can from an artist.
Giving amazing deals to big
chains with huge buying power is fine, but it’s concentrating on the more casual music buyer. I think the industry is missing out on the hardcore following. Recently we’ve been selling audiophile reissues of classic LPs for considerably more than the hard-to-find originals. There is a big group of customers out there who’ll never download their music, and who have a lot of money to spend on the right products.
How confident are you about the future? I’m not very confident in the future of the shop really. We keep trying new things to boost our sales, but having analysed it, for us it’s not about our stock, or our prices. It’s about the amount of people coming
through the door. The slow migration of people
to online purchasing is killing record shops like ours. In a way, you can’t blame people – why go trawling through record racks in several shops when you can just type the title in eBay and buy it in a matter of seconds? It will be a sad day when the
record shops are gone. I know of 10 that have closed in the past two years, and I’m sure there are considerably more than that nationally. We already have a website which supplements our retail shop. I guess eventually our whole business will head online. That will be a sad day for this particular daydreamer who always longed to run his own record shop.
This week’s High Street Hero Jason Moore takes on his digital rivals ...
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