Y’all, I love record stores. I know, what a hot take from a music fan, but I’m not a person who buys a ton of stuff outside of stuff like vinyl and books. Having a store where I can browse and find something I want to buy is special.
More than that, they’ve been a trusted institution for decades. Formats have come, gone, and returned in their time. And while streaming has put pressure on many, there’s still no better place for in-person musical curation and discovery than your local record shop. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had about records — whether I bought them, saw them in the stacks, or heard them playing in the store.
Before this year’s Record Store Day, I contacted Stephen Judge, owner of Schoolkids Records in Raleigh. I made the trek over from Durham and ended up having an hour-long chat with Stephen right after he opened. Our dialogue was occasionally broken by music-loving shoppers looking for specific releases, but it fed back into the greater conversation every time. It was a fascinating look at the store’s long history and the current state of physical music.
What have you been listening to lately?
Stephen: We had Black Country, New Road listening party yesterday, so I listened to that. I like that record [Forever Howlong]. Lucy Dacus, I really like that new record [Forever Is a Feeling] a lot. It’s great. We had a listening party for her, too.
It’s awesome because it forces me to listen. Sometimes I don’t have time. I’m not saying I don’t listen to the music, I do, but it’s background noise while I’m here. It’s a lot easier to put on things I’m familiar with.
There’s a scene in High Fidelity where John Cusack says, “Just play something I can ignore.” He wanted something that would not draw attention to itself while trying to concentrate and do inventory. I resonated with that because it’s distracting to change the music to something that draws more attention to itself, compared to something mellow and chill. There are other moments when I get to listen to an album. That’s more likely when I’m out for a walk and have my headphones on than when I’m in the store.
I’m putting a record out for Record Store Day on my label that I also really love. It’s an artist named Liam Finn. His dad is the lead singer of Crowded House. They’re a New Zealand band, sort of legends of the 80s and early 90s. I really love his new record; it’s all over the place. There are great pop songs on it and then there’s quirky, crazy shit. He plays all the instruments, kind of like Prince.
I’ve been listening to a lot of 80s and 90s stuff. That’s my constant to go back to, just bands I grew up with like Echo and the Bunnymen, R.E.M., or The Cure. The new Cure record [Songs of a Lost World] is really good. That made me go back and listen to all their records again. So I’m kind of all over the place. It’s just wherever my brain takes me at that moment.
I feel like that’s a good mix of having your comfort music and also keeping your ear out for the hot new artists.
That’s a good part about working here. I’m having conversations, seeing what people are buying. Not that that dictates a great record necessarily, but it usually does because folks are spending the money on a physical format, especially with the vinyl prices these days. Someone will mention something like the new Beth Gibbons record [Lives Outgrown] and it ends up on my list to listen to. I’ve been talking up the last Gary Clark Jr. record [JPEG Raw] like crazy because I love that album.
That’s one of the purposes of a record store. Algorithms aren’t going to tell you that, they’re not going to take you out of what they perceive as your lane. If you listen to a lot of records that way, you probably would never discover some great world music that’s out there, because algorithms are going to think that you wouldn’t like that.
I love building a rapport with my local record store owners. It’s my favorite form of music curation.
There’s a lot of music out there; it’s a lot to keep up with. I listen to music pretty much all day, every day, and it’s still overwhelming. Surfing through that is a challenge for anyone. I feel an obligation to keep up with certain records, hear them, and have a general sense of them. Not judging whether it’s good or not but knowing if people are going to want this.
I have college friends who used to go see shows with me all the time. We would see Nirvana, Sunny Day Real Estate, or The Smashing Pumpkins played to a hundred people. These guys were on top of the newest stuff before it got big, you know. But now we’re in our 50s; they have families and they don’t go out as much. If The Afghan Whigs play, you might see him at Cat’s Cradle, but they don’t keep up with the new stuff. So if they go to a record shop, they don’t know who these bands are.
My advice for those folks is always to dive back in. Streaming makes it so accessible to discover new music on your own. Before, we had to rely on radio and music videos on MTV to learn about what was popular. Now, people have full control to go wherever they want with it. Unfortunately, it has become the way that everyone consumes music. You lose the word-of-mouth discovery from borrowing a record, tape, or CD from a friend.
Seeing the physical component come back, which started with vinyl and now has branched off into cassettes and CDs, is really great. At the end of the day, holding your hand and having it is an entirely different human experience than being able to stream it. It feels like after 20 years, people are actually starting to use streaming services to discover music that they’re going to go out and purchase instead of the only way that they ever consume music.
I feel like you — and any interested readers! — would be interested in the book Mood Machine by Liz Pelly. It’s all about Spotify’s business practices over the years and the role they play in devaluing physical media.
Oh yeah, I want to read that. I know there’s always going to be a streaming-only demographic. But the real music people are starting to want to buy the physical component. It’s not just about vinyl anymore, which is the thing I’m the most excited about. It’s not one-dimensional, it’s not a hip thing. It’s a real thing that people want to invest in and physically own.
To that point, it’s not just physical music we’re selling. More and more people are coming in and asking for DVDs. We’ve always taken them in, but been like, “Where are we going to put the DVDs? Let’s just put them over there.” Now people are specifically coming in and looking in that section, or even calling and asking if we have them. If DVDs were their primary source and they spent a lot of money on that format, they probably wouldn’t buy this stuff in 10 years because they could get something else.
There’s an abundance of used copies in the marketplace, and people are buying this. That’s how the vinyl resurgence started. There were just a bunch of records sitting around, and nobody was buying them. You couldn’t sell them for two bucks, but suddenly, people were there, and demand went up. I think people are getting fed up with figuring out which platform a movie or show is on. Or content getting removed from streaming entirely.
Let’s look back from this interesting moment for physical media to you taking over Schoolkids Records. Can you give an abridged history of your experience with the store and how you became the owner?
I had worked here on and off for a decade, basically all the 90s. I say on and off because I was doing other things. I used to manage a band called Athenaeum that got signed to Atlantic Records in 1996 and did two major label records. And so I was doing that full time when I wasn’t working here.
I came back and left again to work for Redeye Distribution and Yep Roc Records. I ran every department there: sales, marketing, A&R, and accounting. I have an accounting degree. Eventually, I was the company’s first general manager. Nowadays, they distribute Matador and all the top independents; back then, we distributed independent artists but weren’t big enough for that.
By virtue of working there and being the guy who oversaw everything, I saw the vinyl resurgence coming back. Little mom-and-pop stores were popping up in very small, weird markets around the country. We had records that they wanted, and they were opening up accounts with us that I had to sign off on. I started noticing some of them were doing pretty well.
So I called my old boss, Mike, and said, “You need to reinvest in the vinyl. There are people who want it.” I thought he should try to get a beer license and give another excuse for that crowd to come here. If you’ve got a record and a beer for them, they will come back. At that point, he was ready to be done with the business. He was just waiting and asked if I’d take it over.
I put everything I had into building back up the vinyl, trying to rebuild the clientele, cleaning the store up to make it more presentable, and getting back involved with the local music scene. I had this long history with the local scene because I’d managed and worked with some of the bands. And at Redeye, we distributed a lot of those bands, and Yep Roc put out some of them. So I just went in with that and it took off.
How has the landscape evolved the most since you’ve taken over?
The resurgence of vinyl was much bigger than I even expected. Two years later, I could move it to the current location and put in the bar; all the things that I wanted to do. We’ve been here for 11 years. What’s really interesting now is seeing it come around on all formats. We’re just talking about DVDs, cassettes, and CDs. My CD sales are exploding right now. If you’re a record shop and you don’t have a robust CD section, you better get on it fast because you’re leaving so much on the table.
I had always anticipated that would happen, so I’ve been stockpiling them for years. Obviously, we’ve dealt with the constant ebbs and flows of retail. In the middle of that, we’ve dealt with the vinyl resurgence not being a secret anymore. It’s in USA Today. Even grandmothers know about it.
It’s become corrupt on the top side as far as undercutting us and the same old bullshit they pulled in the 90s with CDs. I see the same thing happening over again, which is a great perspective to have. Many young record store owners are new to this and weren’t doing this when I was young. They didn’t see that happening and didn’t realize this is history repeating itself.
Image credit: emma_essersnaps5
What’s your process of curating inventory, from ordering the records to balancing the new and used side of things?
Everything’s based on what people want. I have to honor that and not try to go beyond that just because I really like certain records. It doesn’t mean shit if it doesn’t sell. I might bring something in just because I like it and I can play it a lot, which means the chances of selling are higher. But it doesn’t really do us any good if something doesn’t sell.
We sell a lot of the things that are sort of everyday records that people sell all the time. I’ve had employees here in the past that have said, “Doesn’t everybody already have Dark Side of the Moon?” Sure, we do, because we’re music nuts. But the general public probably doesn’t. That record is always going to sell, and if it doesn’t, something’s wrong. Same thing with Rumours by Fleetwood Mac; it’s ridiculous how many copies we sell of that.
I want to do this across all genres. But it isn’t easy because it’s a huge investment and takes a long time. The exciting part is that I can do it on CD now, which is more affordable. Just trying to make sure that each section and genre is built up robustly with what we would consider “the classics.” We just had a customer looking for Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge by My Chemical Romance. It’s irrelevant whether you like it or not; it’s a classic. And that’s a record that I should have all the time.
Now my challenge is trying to do that on CD and vinyl, especially what’s available in blues, jazz, metal, and hip-hop. It can be overwhelming. Sometimes I have to focus on one genre at a time. Like rock, it’s a very broad genre. I know I need to keep Fleetwood Mac, David Bowie, and artists like that in stock. Then I go to hip-hop: I know I will sell Mac Miller. I’m going to sell four copies of that before I sell one Aerosmith record, but I’m going to sell Aerosmith too.
That’s a wide clientele to cater to and support.
Oh yeah, it’s all over the place. We got people looking for Isaac Hayes records or classic R&B CDs and can’t believe we don’t have it. The best way to focus on the core classics. Not every album from every artist is going to sell. Like I could have every Green Day record, but I only really need American Idiot, Dookie, the new one [Saviors], which did pretty well, and the first two.
I have to build it from there, give myself a budget for that, and then try to keep up with the new releases. That’s a rabbit hole on its own. Then you risk getting too wrapped up into what’s hip and cool and what should be the cutting edge vs. what actually sells. If I can get the inventory to a robust place on both CD and vinyl, then I can afford to carry some of those other things and take those chances and sit on those records for 6-8 months and not worry about it.
What people want is fluid and constantly changing. If you had asked me that question a year ago, I wouldn’t have even mentioned CDs.
How do you balance all of that with events like listening parties for new records?
It’s challenging because you don’t know a lot of times how something’s going to do. Black Country, New Road is a great example. I sold 12 copies of it last night, and they have always been a good-selling band for us. But I don’t think I would have sold 12 copies. I may have sold two or three.
Those kinds of events make me prioritize a record like that more. It also attracts customers and gives them a reason to buy it here instead of streaming it and eventually buying it somewhere else—or just forgetting all altogether.
Image credit: discoveriesofficial
What about Record Store Day? You’ve been able to see that grown over the course of the vinyl resurgence.
It’s completely different. Before I bought the store, I was touring with an Australian band called The Church. They had a big hit in the late 80s called “Under the Milky Way” and we were playing at the equivalent of the Cat’s Cradle in Cleveland. I was setting up the merch table, but Marty, the guitarist, and a couple of other guys went to the record shop. And it happened to be Record Store Day. They came back and said, “You’re not going to believe the crowd we saw!”
That was the moment when I thought, “OK, this is something,” but now it’s just out of control. I remember our biggest days as a store when Guns N’ Roses‘ Use Your Illusion records and Pearl Jam‘s second record [Vs.] came out. We did a midnight release for both, and there was a queue around the corner and two and a half blocks long. I thought we’re never going to even remotely come close to selling that many records. Those days aren’t even our top 10 best sales days anymore because of Record Store Day.
It’s so big that we no longer allow people to camp outside because it got out of control. Especially when the pop stars started getting involved. Nobody was doing anything wrong, but now you’ve got kids and their parents. They’re not going to camp outside; they’ve got school and jobs. The weather factors in and rain can become a problem.
So we started doing a virtual queue where I posted a Google Doc online and said, “Go!” Every year it just gets bigger. I used not to let anybody know when I was doing it, but now I give them a hint. It’s like concert ticket sales: they’re going on sale at 11 o’clock. This year, I had 400 people sign up in five minutes. I just turned it off last wee,k and it was up to 750 names. It’s crazy.
Instead of trying to make it bigger and bigger, I use it as an opportunity to stock up on everything, sell what we can, and move on from it. It’s so much work for one day. It’s incredible, but it does interfere a little bit with our normal daily business. I’m not going to complain about that because we do 30x more business on that day than we do on any normal Saturday.
I get amazed every year just how big it’s gotten. When something gets that big, it has its share of issues. But I remember where things were, so I won’t disparage that. The purpose of it is to get people out, come, walk into a record store, and buy records. If people are buying physical music, then hallelujah. I don’t care what they’re buying. That’s a good thing.
What advice would you give someone wanting to own a record store or sell records?
When you’re investing into what you’re going to bring in initially, you may or may not know your market. You may know your friends, you may go to a show and see people there, you may know that people want records, and you may want to help contribute to that if nobody else is doing it. But you’ve got to throw what you want and like out the window.
If you just stock it up based on what you like, you will blow all your money into that. Then someone might come in wanting Lynyrd Skynyrd, and maybe you didn’t think about that, then you’re losing out. It’s easier to stay in your comfort zone, but you’ve got to stretch out past that. If you’re going to do that, I would say don’t put all your money into your initial stock. Spend a certain amount, cover the sort of basics, and then get a feel for what people want when they come in.
Remember, it’s a business, not a vanity project. You’ve got to pay insurance, electricity, employees, and time off. You can’t work every single day. You’ve got to find a way to balance your life outside of it, or you’ll go mad.
Do you have any local or North Carolina-specific artists, fans, businesses, or folks that you want to shout out?
There’s such a great history here in this state. I love what Merge Records is doing and what they’ve always represented and been doing. They’re idols of mine. I love their roster. The same goes for the folks at Redeye Distribution, Yep Roc Records, and the other small independent labels around here, too. The guys who manage MJ Lenderman are really great, and their label is too.
I love the ’90s era from here, like Archers of Loaf and bands like that. They’re still classics to me. I was lucky. I was the same age as those guys. I was going to see them when they were playing for five bucks. I love seeing that the music still resonates and has a market today, 30 years later.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Leave a Reply