24 Music Week 23.11.12 RETAIL
www.musicweek.com
Owner: Eric Craig UNKNOWN PLEASURES
Give us a bit of background on the store… The shop opened at the end of 2006 because we were forced out of St. Andrews where we had another shop called Unknown Pleasures. I moved up to Scotland at the
end of 2004 and looked at various locations to open a store and St. Andrews seemed like the place because it didn’t have a music store of any sort except for Tesco and it had tourists and students. That shop was going along
fine but then Fopp opened a store next door to Tesco. It was six months before they went down but while they were open they were really killing our business. Just when Fopp closed its door and we started to get back to normal the council hit us with a 45% rent increase, the bills got too big so I went searching for another location, scouted around Edinburgh and came across the Royal Mile, where the Scottish
Parliament had just opened as a tourist attraction. The bottom of the street has a history of being cheap and rundown but I thought the Scottish Parliament opening would give it a lift, took a chance on the location and it worked really well.
How’s business compared to when you first set up? November is one of the quietest times of the year, along with January and February, but whenever there are any visitors in Edinburgh we do really well. There’s been a steady upward trend in takings, which is great and quite surprising given the massive recession. We don’t do new. My basic philosophy since I went into bricks and mortar retail has been to stay away from new. Selling new vinyl and CDs is a recipe for going bankrupt – it’s the distributors that are responsible, they’ve never come to terms with the fact that they cannot ask for £8 plus VAT for a
INTERNET VS HUMAN
110 Canongate Edinburgh EH8 8DD t 0131 652 3537
wvinylnet.co.uk
“We don’t do new... Selling new vinyl and CDs is a recipe for going bankrupt” ERIC CRAIG, UNKNOWN PLEASURES
new CD from a retailer and expect them to survive in competition with iTunes, Tesco and Fopp. So we don’t do new and we only do vinyl.
People have been pointing to a vinyl revival, do you see that yourself? I’m a bit of a cynic when it comes to the vinyl revival story. It’s just part of the news-cycle, they seem to drag it out at certain points in the year when there’s nothing else to talk
about and the sales figures for new vinyl come out. I’ve heard of a vinyl revival every year since 1997 when I started. In the past couple of years it
does seem to be true though. I would certainly say that in certain parts of the collectors’ market, the influence of the Russians going mental for vinyl has been just fantastic.
The Russians? Yeah. The internet is besieged by Russian dealers buying vast stocks of Seventies prog rock and metal. We had to have our website translated into Russian. We’ve got around 10 Russian dealers who order 30 or 40 titles every time we update the site – I’d guess we’re shipping 500 to 1,000 titles to Russia a month.
They buy stuff like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Genesis as fast as they can but then prices for bands like Budgie have gone from a tenner to 70 or 80 quid in a year. When you can buy stuff like that for a pound out of people’s collections and you can sell them for £50 why on earth would you touch new vinyl?
How confident are you about the future of the physical shop? Very confident. As I say, takings have increased year-on-year. We had a slightly weaker [Fringe] festival in Edinburgh this year than previously but the earlier months compensated for that. When I tell our story I sound
like I’m blowing my own trumpet but we just haven’t really noticed the recession.
This week’s High Street Hero Eric Craig takes on his digital rivals ...
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ERIC RECOMMENDED...
MISTY IN ROOTS Live At The Counter
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