Rough Trade
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- moth
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/…
http://www.roughtrade.comOpen their new store off brick lane today.
Free WiFi, music and coffee. Can't wait to see what they've done to the place..
- TheBlueOne0
Good luck to 'em, but it's not gonna last more than two years. It's a dead industry. Sure people will come in and pick the staff's brains for recommendations and then go home and download the shit off torrents.
I too was once a record store jockey..and a damn good one...but those times is ovah...
- Concrete0
Is it going next door to the Big Chill? Should be good. The Covent garden shop makes me claustrophobic.
- moth0
Is it going next door to the Big Chill?
Concrete
(Jul 20 07, 02:33)Yes.
- lowimpakt0
Good luck to 'em, but it's not gonna last more than two years. It's a dead industry. Sure people will come in and pick the staff's brains for recommendations and then go home and download the shit off torrents.
I too was once a record store jockey..and a damn good one...but those times is ovah...
TheBlueOne
(Jul 20 07, 02:32)
----------------------"The data, released by the UK's industry group BPI, shows that 7in vinyl sales were up 13% in the first half, with the White Stripes' Icky Thump the best seller."
- Chimp0
Yep, the kids are buying more 7" now. I supose its a natural reaction to MP3s
- TheBlueOne0
Yeah. What's the markup on 7inch singles? You gonna pay the rent, payroll, insurance and other sundry business items on the markup on 7inch singles?
I don't think so.
- TheBlueOne0
Look, what I'm saying is, back in the mid 90's when I managed a mom-and-pop independent store, we'd buy cd's from wholesalers and the wholesale cost was $11-12 on new releases..sometimes it was $13 depending..now we'd sell them at 16.98/17.98 and we lost customers in droves..kmart, walmart and tower would sell them at our cost or fucking below. Drove a store that had been in business since 1967 out of business. The markup on cd's sucked, and it was worse on vinyl and singles at the time. It hasn't gotten any better and far more people get stuff online than at that time.
It's a dead dead industry.
If Rough Trade (funny I remember ordering from them back in the early 90's!! Their prices were even worse!! Well, bc they were imports and they didn't take returns from retailers so you'd be stuck with the crap)..well if they're planning alternate revenue streams like coffee and fish n chips and edgy punk rock clothing, cool..but they're not going to survive selling 7" Vinyl records to the "sool kids".
Fuck, I'm a music-o-phile and I haven't bought a cd in over two years.
- moth0
They also offer digital blueone.
They have some pretty interesting plans for this store. And in all honesty - with the vibe and music - they'll make a killing on coffee alone.
- Nairn0
Thanks for the heads'up, moth.
Every time I've been in Rough Trade it's packed. I guess if it was any other independent store they'd have quite a struggle ahead, but RT's kind of mecca-like. Moth's right - I can see the peeps going there just to spend a small fortune on coffee and pain au chocolat.
But surely that means it's died inside a little already?
- TheBlueOne0
Well, I hope you guys are right..that'd be an oasis of cool that the world needs..
- Jaline0
Over here, scene kids think themselves to be more genuine music fans if they buy the vinyl stuff.
Not sure what the vibe is over there though.
- moth0
If I was going to have someone spend £1000 of my money on new music, I would let these guys do it.
I've a few of their compilations and there's never a bad track on 'em.
- mikotondria20
Oh to be riotously ambivalent about vinyl - en mass, whatever blips trend might throw up, there's no real living stocking and moving vinyl in the highstreet. To my mind nothing sounds or smells like music like vinyl does.. Did some dance music production back in the day, and always salivated about taking our finished masters (which we had processed and polished and expanded and compressed and 'aired' in their Sunday best), to the cutting rooms, when the engineer would just spend a few minutes adjusting the eq going into his particularly and personally known cutting machine, and run off a few grooves for our approval..
A - The digital master...
B - The sound of that ably and gently persuaded into a singular analog groove..
Oh ! The humanity.
Through a set of 40 thousand pound behemoth mastering reference monitors, the difference is palpable.. All parts of the program, however complex it is, are literally welded together, its like hearing the piece in color for the first time. Dynamically it seemed there was inifinite headroom, and the soundstage peeled off tantalisingly into the distance, in infinite clarity - a boundless horizon. If a flea had farted you could have heard it at any point in the track..
From then on, it is sadly downhill - The closest sonically similar, cheap available material is vinyl, and with the right playback equipment it does a mighty fine job of emulating the master groove.. And so on, down the scale, poorer equipment, damaging nightclub styli, scratches and dust remove more and more fidelity from what is in theory an almost infinitely complex structure - the resolution of the material at any one point being limited at the (albe they rather large), molecular level, also a thumbnail equivalent of billions of Hz sample frequency, as discretely behaving as polymer surfaces can be..No digital standard, encoding, dacs, or other chip-based psycho acoustrickery will match the breathless norse-god power of a freshly cooked groove, and I will never suck the shit-sandwich that sells itself as 'all your favorite music ever, right in your pocket'...MP3s suck satan's 16khz cock, and stroke his balls while he makes whistling sounds replace intricacy and definition in the music we love, to the extent that kids today actually think it's supposed to fphwsssound like that.
I think I'm done.
- lofielectronic0
Rough Trade
www.telegraph.co.uk/ar...
www.roughtrade.comOpen their new store off brick lane today.
moth
(Jul 20 07, 01:59)Apparently not?
"Apologies to everyone waiting with bated breath for the official opening of our new East London store, this has unfortunately been delayed until Monday 23rd July."