Part of a number of thriving independent record stores in and around the now notorious Williamsburg corner of Brooklyn, Academy Records has achieved that rare equilibrium of a fantastic selection and knock-out prices. iCrates spent an afternoon browsing in Brooklyn and brought back this report…
Please introduce yourself: What’s your name and your position?
My name’s Ian. I’m one of the buyers at the store.
Where are you based? Is this your main store?
This is our largest store here in Brooklyn (96 North 6th Street), but we have another store in the East Village. That was there first. There is also a third store which is somewhat different. That’s mostly CDs and classical music and it’s on 18th Street in Manhattan.
Do you have a website?
Which music styles do you sell and since when have you been open?
We’ve been open about 7 years and we try to sell all kinds of music. We have classical records, disco, hip hop, rock, country, blues, jazz, soul, international music, spoken word records… We try to pretty much do everything. Even stuff we don’t sell very well like big bands and classical, we still have a little bit of for the people who want to buy it.
And do people come in to buy those as well?
Yeah, not as much, but we have guys that do buy the Benny Goodman records and stuff like that.
Are you specialised in any specific music style? Do you sell records that are hard to find anywhere else?
Well we do have a small section of new releases and reissues and we try to get things that are maybe a little more obscure, that you’re not gonna find in all the other shops. We also have our own label on which we reissue mostly African funk and Afro-psych records and we always have those in stock. A lot of people hear about the label and come to the store to get the records.
And what’s the name of the label?
Academy LPs.
How many records have you got in store?
If I had to guess I would say… 40,000 maybe… or maybe more, I’m not sure.
Why did you decide to deal with records and work in a record store? Is it just love? Just business? Just …?
I’ve been collecting records since I was a teenager. I started buying punk records that you couldn’t get on CD or were hard to find. I don’t listen to that much of that music now, but I’ve been collecting records for a long time and I got to know the guys who worked here and at one point they asked me if I wanted a job!
Who are your customers? How old are they? Who is your most famous client?
It’s a really wide range. I mean we get some teenagers, but I would say most of our customers are in their 30s to 50s probably, some in their 20s too. Mostly men, not that many women. As for famous people I’m probably not the right person to even ask because I don’t recognize people very well. But yeah, Large Professor comes in a lot, a fair number of fairly well known DJs I guess, but I couldn’t tell you their names. Also a lot of local bands come through, you know, Brooklyn-based people. Thurston Moore comes in a lot when they’re playing in town, or J Mascis from Dinosaur Jr. There’s a big rock club down the street, so depending on who’s playing there, we do get a fair amount of people coming in to check out the store.
How do you recognise an interesting record?
Well I see so many records all the time and if it’s something I haven’t seen before or I don’t recognise immediately that’s something that is interesting to me. There are certain labels that I know I’m interested in or I know that are good things to sell, like anything on Blue Note Records or Prestige Records for example. But at the same time there are a lot of records that come in and if something looks like it’s… not quite homemade, but very plain, with a really basic label and something that seems like I haven’t heard of it and it’s old… There’s something about that which is attractive as well.
Which one is your oldest record?
Well we have 78s, so we have records in the store from the late 20s, from 1927-28.
Which one is your most valuable record?
Hmm, I’m trying to think. I mean we have a very rare Zen Bow 12” which sells for $300 or more. We have it on the wall now. We’ve had other nice things in too. We recently sold a 45 by Little Nicky Soul that sold for $1680, so that was a pretty big one!
How do you set your prices?
It depends on what you can sell something for, what you think people will buy things for. We’ll sell nice copies of a lot of common records that were Top 40 records in the 60s, 70s, 80s that you see all the time for $3-5. Just because if we had them higher than that, they would build up in the store faster than they sold. For higher priced stuff, for something I don’t recognise or it looks like a valuable record, you can look online. Some people have different opinions about whether you should price records based on ebay or discogs or whatever, but it’s a good guideline. We try to price things a little bit lower than what we would think they’d sell for online, so if someone comes in the store and says “Oh, that’s $10 cheaper than I would pay on ebay!” they’ll buy that. We try to be fair about it, try to not set our prices too high. And if things don’t sell, if I’ve had a record up in the store for six months, we’ll mark it down, make it cheaper. ‘Cause if it’s not selling at $10 maybe it’ll sell at $6.
What do you think will the vinyl business be like in the year 2030? Will there just be old and rare records or still new pressings?
I think people will still be making new records. I think there’s enough young people who are interested in buying records even in twenty years from now. As long as the pressing plants can stay open, which I don’t think will be a problem. You see it’s becoming more and more the main alternative to downloading things. I think people don’t really buy CDs as much as they used to, and so for a lot of them it’s either “I’m gonna download something” or “I’m gonna buy the vinyl”, and I think that’s great. And from what I’ve heard from people I know who work at pressing plants and in manufacturing, they’re saying they’re much busier in the past few years than they were for a long time, which I think is a good sign! There are businesses that are being successful, I don’t think they’re gonna be closing for economic reasons anytime too soon.
Address:
96 North 6th Street
Brooklyn, NY
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