Talking Record Store Day Australia with AMRA

Next Saturday, April 19, will see floods of music lovers flock to their local record stores, in order to purchase the limited-edition releases on offer, or simply to enjoy the ritualistic pleasure of browsing through racks of records. It’s all in aid of Record Store Day Australia, the national day in which all things collectable and round are feted. We chat to Ian Harvey – Executive Director of the Australian Music Retailers Association, who co-ordinate the day – about why in 2014, tangible records are still as important to people as ever.

When did the Australian offshoot of Record Store Day start, and what prompted it?

We began one year after the Americans [in 2008], so this is our sixth year.  Brain ’Frog’ Harris  at Songland in Canberra approached Leading Edge Music to run it in Australia, for the indie stores in their buying group, but LEM recognised it was bigger than them, so brought it to the Australian Music Retailers Association [AMRA], and we run it.  It’s not just AMRA members who participate, though.

How many stores and labels came on board first year, and how much has it grown?

The first year got up-and-running quite quickly, and since then it’s grown in different ways.  I don’t remember exact numbers in the first year, but I can say that this year we’ve run out of POS [Point Of Sale] packs. We printed more posters and balloons than last year, but have now run out … demand was way higher than expected.

Why do you think vinyl as a format has lasted?

Anyone in marketing talks about ’customer fragmentation’ and the music industry, as ever, is on the pointy end of customer change.  You just have to look at all the different genres, and genres within genres, to see that. Gone are the days when we all rushed out and bought the same album.  And audio quality is also part of that customer fragmentation; MP3 is convenient and for those with cloth ears the clipped and compressed audio quality is a compromise they probably don’t realise they’re making for the sake of that convenience.

Vinyl is a totally different listening experience: the audio quality is richer and rounder, less glassy and brittle than many CD recordings, and a record is something you sit and listen to; it’s not background noise. There’s something so much more emotionally involving and satisfying about playing a record, than a CD or an MP3.  For a start you have to change it over every 20 minutes or so. And having to stay physically connected: pulling the record out of the sleeve, putting it on, brushing it before playing, carefully lowering the needle – that all creates a much more tactile connection that translates into more involvement with the music.

And in regard to the music,  you can hear it the way it was engineered to sound, though sadly these days the audio engineer will often mix for MP3 because they know the majority of people will hear it that way.  Finally, there’s a wonderful collector element to vinyl that just doesn’t exist with MP3 and seems to have declined for CD since it was first launched.

Record Store Day is April 19. For a full list of participating stores, click on these words.