RECORD SHOPS FIND A GROOVE
Owners say growing competition for vinyl is a win for everyone
The Tiny Record Shop’s recent expansion into not-quite-so-tiny new digs is, Trevor Larocque admits, largely “an illusion.” But its symbolic value stands.
An endangered species just a decade ago, the record shop has clawed its way off the critical list on the back of the vinyl LP’s commercial resurgence in recent years and was in thoroughly stable condition in Toronto as 2018 drew to a close. An informed bet would be that there will be more record shops on our streets, not fewer, at the end of 2019.
Larocque and his partner, Maude Fallon-Davesne, for instance, opened their record nook in a 77-square-foot space at Queen St. and Broadview Ave. in the back of gift shop Token four years ago as a pseudo pop-up enterprise intended to rid their home of half of the vast record collection he’d been accumulating since junior high and clear some space for two young children. It went so well that, this past November, the Tiny Record Shop relocated to decidedly more permanent-feeling digs at 777 Queen St. E. — still behind Token, to keep it real, and with most of the 220 square feet now at its disposal expended on higher ceilings rather than expanded (albeit less cratecluttered) floor space — and “it’s going great.”
“I wanted to open it for a year just to get rid of my collection. That was the idea: I started it with half my collection and we were testing out an idea,” says Larocque, who also runs Toronto indie label Paper Bag Records — currently home to Sam Roberts, Born Ruffians, Art d’Ecco and the Rural Alberta Advantage, whose frontman, Nils Edenloff, was poking around Tiny Record Shop the day we talked.
Back in the day, Larocque worked for fallen music-retail chain HMV Canada and, as a pathological music consumer, watched in dismay the company’s eventual, fatal degeneration into a “mall store” selling videogames and T-shirts and DVDs and “all these things that just weren’t inspiring to me in a music shop.” But small operations such as Tiny Record Shop are well positioned to belat- edly pick up the pieces left by those all-things-to-all-people operations.
“Like most things, when it’s big, it gets crushed and then fractured and we each take a piece of each thing and do it our own way and do it special. It’s like specialty shops,” he opines. “We’re all our own specialty shop. We all do something unique. Each shop is this idea that each owner has of what a record shop is that they want to present to customers. So that’s what I’ve done. Because I get to travel the world with Paper Bag and I buy records everywhere — I never stopped buying records — I took all the ideas that I saw around the world in all those shops and I tried to apply it to this, to fill whatever gap wasn’t being filled by the other shops that already existed. Otherwise, what was the point of opening a shop?
“I specialize in hard-to-find ’90s hiphop and alternative records. That’s what I do because I travel the world and buy those records. So that’s the niche that I was able to bring to the city in a city that has plenty of great record shops. You just have to find your own place. I found my own place.”
A niche is the key.
I can step out of my apartment at Dundas St. and Ossington Ave. these days and access four record shops within roughly two blocks and a five-minute walk. A year ago, there were two within that same radius.
Two of these, Rotate This and Grasshopper Records, existed in one form or another well before vinyl started to tick back onto the popular radar — the former as Toronto’s ’90s go-to spot for new indie-rock vinyl when 95 per cent of the public thought new vinyl was unattainable, the latter initially just as Derek (Grasshopper) Madison selling LPs from his collection on the streets of Kensington Market. The meticulously curated Invisible City, recently relocated to Dundas West from its original location on Geary Ave., and soul-and-blues focused “vinyl café” Antikka on Queen St., moved into the neighbourhood just this past year, both offering booze and coffee along with the rarefied wax on offer.
If I keep moving on foot in any direction for another 30 minutes I can hit, just to name a few, two Cosmos Records locations at Queen St. and Palmerston Blvd. and Queen and Portland Sts.; Female Treble on Dundas St. W.; Stained Class on Queen St. W. in Parkdale; June Records, Quixotic Sounds and Soundscapes on College St.; Dead Dog Records on Bloor St.; the current incarnations of long-lived institutions Sonic Boom and Play de Record on Spadina Ave.; and Kops Records at 229 Queen St. W., where it’s been since 1976. Talk to the people who run those shops and they’re not worried that their peers are proliferating. Because no two of them do the same thing.
“There are 400 record stores in Tokyo so, yeah, there’s room for more,” observes Aki Abe, who opened Cosmos Records’ first location at 652 Queen St. W. in 1998 at precisely the moment when the compact disc was supposed to be killing vinyl off for good, then the second Cosmos location mere blocks to the west on Palmerston Blvd. 12 years ago when the music industry at large was still only just waking up to the medium’s unwillingness to go away. “I mean, you can’t just open a record store. The owner’s gotta really love it because, if not ... well, we’re not doing this to be rich or anything. You’ve gotta really love it. But if you’re willing to take that chance, I think there’s plenty of room for more record stores. A lot more.”
Cosmos came into the market as a genre-specific used-record shop catering to the DJs who kept vinyl alive during the leanest of the lean years when major labels intent on getting consumers to replace their old records with shiny CDs had more or less completely abandoned the format for new releases. Ironically, those DJs started abandoning 12-inches for cheaper (and more portable) digital tracks and tools such as Serato, Ableton and Traktor during the early years of the millennium, killing a lot of the rave-era record sellers who’d thrived in Toronto long after mostly extinct retail chains such as Sam the Record Man and HMV had largely abandoned vinyl.
Cosmos, mindful of the slow uptick in LP sales happening just as digital downloads began eroding the CD market, started favouring albums over singles. Now, after 13 straight years of growth in vinyl sales — including a whopping 66.6 per cent surge in Canada during the first six months of 2018, according to Nielsen Music’s last mid-year report, and a concurrent 19.2 per cent bump in the U.S. — that’s turned out to be a most prudent move. And those Nielsen figures don’t actually take into account sales of used vinyl at places like Cosmos, or even the new vinyl now being sold with renewed vigour hand-inhand with the old at such venerable downtown shops as Rotate This, Sonic Boom and Kops Records. Most independent retailers don’t report to Nielsen, no matter how many copies of the new Jack White or Mumford & Sons or Robyn albums they move (in any format, for the record), those sales never end up “SoundScanned” onto the Billboard charts.
A similar situation in the U.S. led a recent Forbes analysis to conclude that total sales of new vinyl in the U.S. are “likely to be about 50 per cent higher” than figures from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), meaning “the true total size of the vinyl market in unit volume — new plus used — is about 2.5 times what the RIAA reports.”
“With used vinyl and unreported sales estimates added to the mix,” offered another report, “2017 vinyl sales likely sit well over 30 million units, instead of the 14.3 million reported by RIAA.”
“In retail, there’s going to be a saturation point, sure, and there’s going to be a few shops that open and don’t survive and it’ll be a culling of people who can’t quite cut it for various reasons,” says Sonic Boom proprietor Jeff Barber.
“But our sales were up so dramatically in 2017 from previous years it was incredible — 2018 not as much, but 2017 was just a gigantic jump — and we continue to sell so many turntables, higher-end turntables as well as more entry-level turntables. To me, that means that people are starting to collect and to get into it and deciding, ‘Yeah, I’m into this and I enjoy it and now I want to turn around and buy a $500 turntable,’ but also, as evidenced by all these stores opening up, that people are getting into the shopping experience, which is entertainment in itself.”
The more, the merrier, too. A concentration of vinyl retailers in a given neighbourhood tends to draw record shoppers to that neighbourhood and to all the shops selling records there precisely because that’s where they know record shops are concentrated, much as, say, the Yonge St. strip was a destination for music fans visiting Toronto back in the days when you could bounce from Tower Records to Sam the Record Man to HMV to Sunrise Records to the Vinyl Museum in an afternoon.
“That’s a scene, man,” opines Antikka proprietor Razmik Tchakmak. “If a record store opened right next door to us, I’d be happy. One hundred per cent. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not scared of that. I’m not scared of competition. I think it’s a good thing. It makes you think and it pushes you, right?”
Not that he thinks of other record shops as “competition.”
“That was part of the reason I originally opened on Bloor St.: there were five other record stores within a three-block radius,” says Sonic Boom’s Barber. “To me, that was great because, as a record consumer myself, if I went to a city or if I was spending a day in the city, I would go to the neighbourhood that had a bunch of stores so I could hit ’em all rather than a few farflung, scattered ones.”
“The way I look at it is when there’s a community of record stores, it helps everybody out,” agrees Cosmos’ Abe. “Because you don’t want to just go to one area and you’re just gonna hit one record store — you’re gonna hit two or three, right? So I think from a customer’s perspective, it’s a good thing, and from the standpoint of retail it’s great because everyone carries different things, anyway … A lot of the good shops have their own identity.
“And we all work together. The Sonic Boom guys come here and they send people here and we send people over there. It’s no problem, you know what I mean?” Tim Putman, the man who oversaw Sunrise Records’ 84-store expansion into a number of spaces vacated by HMV across Canada two years ago, is of the same opinion. If there’s a saturation point in the record, he sees it coming from fair- weather vinyl retailers such as Hot Topic or Walmart, who’ll dabble in the format as long as it pays for the floor space devoted to it, but have no real commitment to music over the long term.
“That’s where I can see the saturation coming, from what I would call ‘big-box retailers,’ where it’s not their core competency carrying (vinyl). But I just don’t see it from your independents because they offer something that’s so different from what anyone else can offer.
“It really comes down to having great operators who can give a great experience. There’s something about that, right?” he says. “And, transparently, that’s what we struggle with at Sunrise — when you have 84 stores, it’s hard to have that personal touch with all your customers, whereas when you have the owner in the shop every day it’s, like, ‘Hey, James, good to see you. This came in. I know you want it.’ So I think as long as they can do that, there’s tons of room for more.”
Also, ask the Koppel family: Just keep stocking records for people who like records to buy. It works. It’s worked for Kops Records for 42 years.
“I don’t think you can really oversaturate it,” says co-owner Nick Koppel. “It’s really easy for somebody to have a big collection of records and open up a record store with their collection, and what we see as a constant pattern is that they do and they’ve got all that energy for opening a shop and then they go in and they get picked by vultures and they can’t replace their stock fast enough and then they end up fading out. But people who buy records, who are seriously into records, they turn over stones. So it’s like, can you have too many beaches in the world? You can’t.
“It’s probably hard for somebody getting into it to carry Eagles reissues to cater to that market. Record collectors, like any of us, we do get bored. If we go into a store and we see the same records and they’re not turning over, that can be a problem for a store surviving if they can’t turn over their stock and always have something fresh on a weekly basis for people to look at. That’ll be problematic for new stores opening. But having too many stores, I don’t think, is a problem. It makes Toronto more of a central hub for people and gives another aspect to our tourism industry.”