How the ScotPop Exhibition Centre idea came about

I often get asked how the ScotPop Exhibition Centre idea came about this so I thought if I made a post about this I could also then refer to it when I have to email people rather than get involved in a long explanation never sure how much is known already.

Avalanche used to sell a lot of music by local bands. By a lot I mean hundreds of copies by an artist like Withered Hand and a box of 25 CDs by a band that maybe wasn’t that well known even locally. We gave everything a chance but there were still many releases that sold very little simply because they weren’t very good.

We could easily sell a hundred copies or more when we had an in-store from a band like Idlewild or Twilight Sad for a new album. An album featuring high up in our end of year chart, itself based on sales, could sell an extra 50 to 100 copies because of that. We could add an extra 20 people to a local gig’s attendance just by recommendation to the groups of visitors who would come to the shop normally on the day.

At the same time there was a lot of interest in older Scottish bands from Orange Juice and Josef K to The Shop Assistants and Pastels. Visitors to Avalanche would be looking for current bands that they might like given their taste in other music and as bands like Belle and Sebastian became more established we would get folk looking for similar artists to more current bands too.

There are no recommendations online that work quite as well as would come from a good shop. We wouldn’t just suggest something we would play it so the customer wasn’t relying on our say-so. These bands were not our friends so we played no favourites and we gave people music we thought they would like not what we thought they should like.

Online there is nearly always some agenda and then of course it is easy to listen and decide something isn’t worth your money anyway. One thing that was very relevant, especially in the old days of actually being very busy, particularly on a Saturday, was that playing all this stuff to people was quite time consuming. On the other hand this was balanced by fans who needed no persuasion.

Obviously things gradually changed but so this post doesn’t go on too long let’s fast forward five years or so. Avalanche had moved to the Grassmarket and was gradually building up an influential online and social media presence to add to the shop’s reputation and never been more influential but sales had plummeted. Shops were now competing for sales that were already dropping with the very bands and labels they had supported and customers/fans no longer needed to buy music anyway.

I would still get asked for recommendations as much as ever and even play them but now people would tap the names into their phones saying they would go away and listen more. If lucky they might buy one or two things when before they would have bought many more. In-stores went the same way with sales only a quarter of what might have been expected. With online sales and social media one thing became very clear and that was given a fair chance with a limited gold vinyl Withered Hand album or a Frightened Rabbit album with a bonus 7″ our online reach meant we could sell 100+ but most times we were at a disadvantage and selling  a fraction of what we would have expected just a few years before.

And so the idea for a centre promoting Scottish music but not on a commercial basis was born. At its heart it would still support and promote current bands but it would also celebrate the music from previous years that visitors seemed so keen to talk about with posters, badges and other memorabilia. At that point the idea was as simple a that. Only later would I discover that documenting the last six decades of Scottish artists and their music had been woefully neglected and how much work there was to be done.