Come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls

Meltdown expected

So easy to be cynical about Record Store Day, and even my local indie shop owner in Edinburgh seems to have mixed feelings about it. Excitement, massive queues, sure, and a briefly red hot cash register - but also stock & supply nightmares, minimal in-house profits and a whole host of crowd management problems. That aside, the biggest downer these once-a-year-only visitors cause for the small Independent shop has to be a whole heap of massively disappointed regular customers as the eBay vultures swoop.

I see the problem... for the disappointed punter, it's truly horrible seeing the discs up you just missed out on go up online with 8x face-value mark-ups within an hour, but if the RSD scheme helps a few new recruits realise that they can buy music (even better, buy hard-copy VINYL) in a SHOP and not just off the internet then surely that's got to be a positive thing, hasn't it?

I had to suspend my cynicism totally when the 17 year old lad in front of me put down his hard earned few quid on the counter and chose to buy a 7" single by The Clash. Good old-fashioned proper musical exploration... plus I had bought the exact same single as a teenager myself, first time around, albeit some 33 years ago... vinyl, glorious, crackling vinyl. Yes, I was there, too. And you know what they said, well, some of it was true...