28 MusicWeek 01.02.13 RETAIL
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BLACKCAT RECORDS
Give us a bit of background on Blackcat Records… The shop originally started as another shop called Rooster Records. I took it over six years ago when we were in a small corner shop and I recently moved into a big premises taking over Martian Records. In total the presence of this shop has been in Taunton for 16 years. It’s a mixed shop that does new and secondhand CDs and LPs but it’s just music, we don’t do merch, for example.
Are you a cross-genre shop? Absolutely. Being in a town like Taunton I can’t really specialise, I need to be able to cater for my audience, which is Taunton. As the old saying goes I do doo-wop to hip-hop. I do pretty much everything. The stuff that I don’t do would make a shorter list.
And you haven’t branched away from music like a lot of stores have these days. How is business today?
It’s pretty good actually. I do a
lot of vinyl, a real mix. Vinyl’s always done well: it’s a reliable input and it’s got good margins. Being a record collector myself, I have an enthusiasm for it, which obviously rubs off on what you sell. I know my way around the product, which helps so people enjoy coming in, browsing, asking for advice and sharing music really.
Have you had to adjust much since the rise of digital? Yes and no. You’ve got to be adaptable as a business and I think the audience for music has been getting older for a while. The way that kids consume music changes all the time. The irony is that eventually
everybody always ends up coming back to the same place. If they’re a music fan they come back for licorice pizza. I use the internet like everyone else, I’m not foolish. I have my own website, I sell through third-party sellers like Music Stack, Amazon
INTERNET VS HUMAN WE SAID WE LIKED...
3b Bridge Street Taunton Somerset TA1 1TG t 01823 327701
wblackcat-records.co.uk
“I’d like to think there’ll be some organic revolution where indie traders will move into the High Street, but I’m also a realist ” PHIL HARDING, BLACKCAT RECORDS
and eBay, I have a huge amount of product on those sites, both vinyl and CD – stuff that either won’t sell in the shop or is just too expensive for me to put out. I would say around 10% of business is through our website, not a vast amount but it’s pretty good. It varies enormously, for example it’s snowing outside so right now it’s 100% of business but tomorrow it could be 2%. Year-on-year it does vary significantly as well.
The digital side of things has
in some ways been a good thing because we get to listen to stuff beforehand but it has taken a bit of our audience away.
Is HMV’s situation good or bad for indie record store owners? I think it’s going to cause some pain but, in the long run, it would be good if HMV left the market. I think it’s an old style retailer that’s lost its way. I can’t see how it can recover. All the customers that come in here insist on telling me how they haven’t bought anything from HMV in years. It’s interesting that everyone is referring to it in music terms but only around 20% of HMV’s sales come from music. So, it’s not much of a music shop to me and I think there are players out there who will do a better job.
This week’s High Street Hero Phil takes on his digital rivals ...
Manager: Phil Harding
What will the High Street look like in the next five years? I think the High Street has some significant structural problems that are going to restrict everybody. We’ll see what happened in the late Eighties, which is an empty High Street. The rents are too high for people like me.
I think the indies will continue
to break new ground like they always have, they’ll continue to support the collecting market and the niche market.
Some of them might be able
to get some capital behind them and be able to expand as small chains. I’d like to think that there’ll be some organic revolution where independent traders will move into the High Street, but I’m also a realist.
PHIL RECOMMENDED... AMAZON RECOMMENDED... ALT-J An Awesome Wave DJANGO DJANGO Django Django PELT Effigy
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