In this interview for The Starscream Sessions series, Sean Hannam speaks to Lawrence Montgomery, managing director of Rough Trade record stores, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
From a small shop on West London’s Kensington Park Road, the business, which was founded in 1976, has become a globally-recognised independent music brand.
Rough Trade has seven stores across the UK (London: East, West, Soho and Denmark Street; Bristol, Nottingham, and Liverpool) and sells vinyl, CDs and cassettes, as well as audio tech, books and merch.
Lawrence gives us an update on the business, shares some insights into physical music and tech buying trends, chooses some of his favourite recent albums, and looks ahead to the future of Rough Trade.
Congratulations on the 50th anniversary
Lawrence Montgomery: It’s a great milestone. I’ve [only] been involved with the business for 12 years, so I feel like a steward of the brand. It’s nice to be able to look back, but, at the same time, the brand is built on new music, so, as much as it’s important to celebrate 50 years, it’s also important that we stay true to our core principles.
We’ve been curating an album for every year, which we’re doing as special edition reissues, and then we’re working on a couple of shows with different people. Putting together those 50 albums was quite challenging. The list was very long, and we had a lot of debates.
Overall, labels and management have been super-easy to work with, because they recognise the importance of the milestone, but, of course, there are always intricacies with music and licensing, which doesn’t make it as straightforward as you’d like it to be.
Talking of challenges, how’s business? A lot of retailers are finding it tough…
There are two sides to it. On the positive side, demand is very strong and we’ve had a very strong start to the year. Sales are double-digit up on last year and that’s in line with the market.
In Q1, vinyl sales in the UK were up by about 18%, which, when you consider the situation of the economy, is incredible. That’s a high-growth market to be in, which is encouraging, but, when you look underneath the surface, there are definite challenges.
The inflationary pressures on costs are significant. We’re a real Living Wage employer, so we pay a bit more than the Minimum Wage, which we think is important. But there’s no getting away from the fact that wage costs are up a lot, and there’s the cost-of-living situation, energy costs and everything else. It’s the adage about running a business – sales are good, but you’ve got to keep an eye on the bottom line. We feel a great responsibility to make sure the business is sustainable for a long time to come.
What’s the split of the business between selling physical music and tech?
We’re 80% vinyl and in terms of stereo and hi-fi equipment it’s a very small percentage – less than 1% of our sales. To be honest, we know we could do a lot better with it, but if we were to try and sell turntables above a £300 price point, then that would involve a very different type of service. We respect Richer Sounds, Audio-T and Peter Tyson – retailers that offer a more bespoke service.
What kind of customers are buying turntables from you in-store and online? Is it younger people?
Definitely. I think when people buy them from us, it’s probably their first or second turntable. That fits in with the change in demographic we’ve seen more broadly with customers. It’s been well documented that in terms of the vinyl boom we’re seeing a younger, 18–24-year-old audience, which is more even in terms of the gender split.
We can see from online data that 45+ is 80% male, but 18-24 is 60% male, so it is quite a significant swing and it’s encouraging to see that growth in customers.
We have quite a broad church of customers, but there are two key groups – the older customer, who is more likely to be male, and the younger customer. We see inter-generational shopping in-store – parents with kids, because music is a great way of bonding and having an emotional connection. It’s great when you see that – it’s really heartening.
Do you see a surge of turntable sales around Record Store Day?
We haven’t noticed that as a trend. We see a surge around gifting periods, like Father’s Day, but Record Store Day not so much. I would say that someone who is buying records on Record Store Day is already into it to some extent.
How important is Record Store Day for Rough Trade and how was it this year?
Commercially, you can’t get away from it – it’s incredibly important. April is always our highest turnover month and this year it set a record for us – it was really successful. If Record Store Day was a flash in the pan and for the rest of the year you weren’t seeing a broader growth in vinyl, I would be worried, but I think Record Store Day just symbolises the bigger trend, so that’s positive – our stores are open 363 days a year, so it’s important that the labels and artists continue to support stores all year round.
Record Store Day can be challenging operationally – it’s such a peak and the volume of stock and customers is high – but our internal team are very experienced, and they do an incredible job every year.
From vinyl to cassettes… Are tapes a big seller at Rough Trade?
We see the growth – percentagewise it’s increasing a lot – but to be honest, in terms of units, it’s a speck of dust compared with vinyl sales. What’s driving the growth in cassettes is the same underlying reasons that are driving vinyl sales, and I think you could say the same about the increase in demand for CDs. CDs are one-fifth of vinyl sales for us, but they are growing.
In a digital world, people attribute higher value to a physical object, and cassettes and CDs can be more affordable than vinyl. I don’t see us changing the layout of the stores to include racks and racks of cassettes, but for certain artists with certain campaigns, cassettes can be effective.
Has the impact of new tape player brands like We Are Rewind driven the growth in cassette sales?
They’re a great brand – we do well with them. What they’ve done fits with the vinyl trend, which is that it’s become incredibly aesthetic, and that’s significant for the younger generation. We Are Rewind make beautiful objects that look great on a shelf, but they also sound nice.
Is it younger consumers buying cassettes?
I don’t have any data to back it up, but, instinctively, I would say it probably is. You’re seeing a new generation… We’re moving into a generation that has no perception of a pre-digital world. Millennials knew what analogue was.
My generation remembers the classic thing of taping music off a radio show or making your own tapes, but kids now… it’s just so different for them. I think that creates a demand because they wonder what that was like. And with all the issues of social media and with what digital services do to us, people probably yearn for a time when it wasn’t like that, and I suppose cassette culture kind of represents that.
Which album or artist has taken you by surprise in terms of sales this year?
Angine de Poitrine – there’s an artist that’s taken everyone by surprise, but by the time it hit us, we knew it was going to be massive. It’s quite reassuring in a way that something like that can still happen. It’s amazing to see how that blew up.
Last year, the Geese and Cameron Winter albums exploded and they’ve continued to sell.
Doing the reissue albums for our 50th, it’s been interesting to see where the demand is. A positive side of social media is that catalogue [titles] find new niches. One of the more niche titles we reissued was Mojave 3 [Ask Me Tomorrow] and that sold quickly because of the shoegaze boom being driven by TikTok. So, it’s great when you see some of the catalogue artists that we love and are part of the history finding a new relevance.
What music have you been listening to recently? Have you got any good recommendations?
My favourite record over the past nine months has been the Headache album [Thank You For Almost Everything – a collaboration between writer and poet Francis Hornsby Clark and music-producer Joseph Thornalley, aka Vegyn].
I also really like the Lime Garden album [Maybe Not Tonight], which is good,fun, indie rock.
Rough Trade has seven stores in the UK: London: East, West, Soho and Denmark Street; Bristol, Nottingham, and Liverpool. Do you see the business expanding?
Now, we’re quite happy with what we’ve got, and we’re focused on incremental growth opportunities, so we’ve not got any plans for new stores. We want to make all the spaces serve the communities they are in, to the best of their abilities, and we want to keep on improving the online experience.
With growing the business, it’s a fine balance between gaining scale, staying true to our core principles and retaining quality. So, now, we’re consolidating and seeing what small opportunities come our way.
Some traditional audio tech retailers like Richer Sounds and Sevenoaks Sound and Vision are now selling vinyl in selected stores. Do you see that as a threat or healthy competition?
I think it’s great – as vinyl has grown, there are different segments to the market. We’re part of an ecosystem – of course, we want our business to do well, but we’re only going to serve a certain percentage of the market.
Generally, the diversity of the market and seeing more brands popping up selling vinyl is great. The only time I was a bit sniffy about it was when the supermarkets got into it a few years ago, but they got out of it.
What you don’t want is to get to the point which happened with the CD age, where the majors devalued CDs by selling through the supermarkets, and that created a nasty spiral. We don’t want that with vinyl, but I think audio retailers selling vinyl is the complete opposite – it creates added value because those places are also selling proper audiophile setups, which creates more demand for vinyl, which is good.
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