THE BEAT GOES ON 3B RECORDS HAS BEEN AT THE CUTTING EDGE OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC IN LIVERPOOL FOR 24 YEARS Record Store Day is the one day of the year that all of the independently owned record stores across the world come together with artists to celebrate the art and love of music. It came into being in 2007 when over 700 independent stores in the USA joined up to celebrate their unique culture and it is now held on the third Saturday in April every year all over the place. The day is a shock and awe type raid for collectors with special vinyl and CD releases and various promotional products made exclusively for the occasion with hundreds of artists across the globe making special appearances and performances at rammed in stores. At this point you might be thinking ‘just let those grubby hoarders cop their limited edition 12”s - physical’s dead anyway.’ But you would be wrong. iTunes sales in 2011 accounted for 17.9 percent of the market and HMV, 19.1. So there’s still a craving for physical over digital, there’s life in the record store yet. Liverpool began to earn a reputation as a dance city thanks to the success of nightclubs from The State to Cream through the 90s. 3 Beat Records was there from the beginning starting out as a second hand dance music record stall in Quiggins it attracted DJs from far and wide and is said to have become a favourite of legendary DJs Paul Oakenfold and Seb Fontaine. The shop won numerous awards including Music Week’s independent record shop of the year in 2002. It then moved premises to Slater Street where it remains the cornerstone of the city’s house/trance and electro music scene. The organisers of Record Store Day are keen to thank the people in the stores, who they laud as creative and cool and making the experience on the ground what it is. So we went in store to speak to the man relied upon by fellow DJs and dance music fanatics for his expert knowledge and advice, resident Cream DJ and owner of the-now-named 3B Records Jemmy, to ask his thoughts on the state of the modern record store. Photos by Mike Brits So how did you end up owning 3 Beat? I was in Uni, just about to go into my final year and this job at 3 Beat came up. I’d been shopping there for years, as a massive vinyl junkie basically, and I ended up getting it and it was amazing. There’s something special about the shop, it’s always been there. But four years later in 2009 John and Pez, the previous owners, wanted to shut it to focus on the label. The three of us who were working there at the time didn’t want that - we didn’t want to have to go and find a normal job. So we wanted to keep it going and we bought it. How is the shop doing in these days of digital downloads? It can be hard sometimes but there are certain points of the year that do really well, like Record Store Day, you
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do a month’s takings in a day just on vinyl, it’s ridiculous. Vinyl sales are growing - especially the limited edition releases or the vinyl exclusive stuff - CD sales are dropping and ticket sales are booming. We also do DJ in stores, which do well, with people like Carl Craig, Four Tet, Digweed, Sasha, and Soulwax who have all done them for us. They come to launch their albums or releases. We try to do at least one or two of them a month. It’s tough, I’m not going to lie, nobody is making a lot of money, but we get by nicely and there’s no sign of things changing. Infact there’s certain parts of our business, such as tickets and etickets, which are growing quite quickly so the future is looking bright. How was this year’s Record Store Day compared to previous years? Well it’s only been going three years with us and I reckon it’s grown by about
100% every year and now we have queues outside in the morning with a constant flow of people throughout the day and the records are going so quick we’re like, ‘nooo! Why didn’t we buy more of that!?’ What were the most popular records this year? Caribou sold loads actually, that kind of electronic sound still does really well on vinyl but crosses over to some of the indie heads as well. The White Stripes was a big one, there is such a wide range of people coming through the doors because the lines between genres are much more blurred now and gives us the chance to take a few more risks with the stock we buy in.