A Typical Primark Trip; Now With Added LPs.
It's happened. For weeks I’ve listened, read and watched people talk about how Primark will soon be stocking the latest albums in their UK stores.
Convinced that these were merely rumours designed to generate more public opinion in the state of the dwindling music industry, I took it all with a pinch of salt.
Finally today, as I slowly moved my way further up the typically marathon-esque queue in Primark it became apparent that it had moved into the music business.
"CHART CDs £5" read a promotional stand, fairly modest in size, which below presented a number of highly predictable artist's cds. Of course, Rhianna was present; afterall, having her face on their t shirts has no doubt created a lot of revenue for the store, it only seems fitting they start returning the favour.
The likes of Rizzle Kicks could also be seen but as apparently Primark is merely enduring a trial sell of the cd's, the music commodities were in less favourable presence than the usual £2 tees and novelty knickers.
So is this going to be a worthwhile initiative? Primarily as a concept, after years of CDs being sold in supermarkets it's become completely normal to be shopping for your music adjacent to the frozen food aisle. Surely shopping for your chart CDs next to a t shirt adorning that same artist should go hand in hand?
Of course, they won't be the first fashion retailers to be doing this. You'll find records and CDs being sold in the hero of hipsters, Urban Outfitters and vice versa, music store HMV has been selling novelty and band tees, belts and bags for years now.
Arguably, music and fashion are synonymous; fashion designers like Vivian Westwood is all about the punk-rock movement, Jean Paul Gualtier loved Joan Jett so much he based one of his collections on her leather and fishnets style and Gucci took a leaf out of Dave Bowie's book (his 'suit up' stage) for their 2006 female collection (yes, androgyny a go-go).
It's fairly certain the concept itself will take off. The albums they're choosing to stock practically sell themselves and at a fiver a pop, standing right in front of you while you're in that awful queue they fall right into to the 'impulse buy' category.
But is that what we really want for our favourite music artists? To be part of an impulse-buy, no-brainer kind of industry? The snobby music fan in me likes to think that not all the time, but every now and then, you will spend half an hour, an hour, even longer in the aisle of a music store, deliberating over the cds you're going to buy that week. It's a mentality that faded away with the independent music stores that bred it.
I'd like to think that when I bought those four Who albums last week, it was because I’d watched Tommy and loved it so much I wanted to be educated on the band that had written it, not because I got bored in the queue and picked them up because they were a tenner for the lot (they really were only a tenner. Bargain).
The same goes for that time I bought 'Willenium' because when I saw it, it reminded me of that night me and the girls spent all night trying to rap like Will Smith and sang The Fresh Prince intro on karaoke. Regardless of the fact that Primark is the next place to start selling albums, the last thing we want to do is cheapen music, surely?
In a nutshell, anything that can help resurrect the sales of hard copy music and inject further income for record companies struggling to put music out to the people is a good thing, right?
In an ideal world, Primark would be selling brand-new, maybe even underground bands' music, the kind that could really get something from the extra revenue. For now, it's going to be Rihanna and Rizzle Kicks. But after the realisation that Primark are actually investing in music, who knows what could happen next?
FemaleFirst Carla Pearce
Tagged in Primark