Touched a nerve there, I think...

April 16th – Hell hath no fury like a retailer scorned.

The power’s in the music! Nope. The power’s in the music-maker?” Nope. The power’s in the retailer, schmuck! 

I think I can speak from first-hand experience when I say that, of all the people standing in line for a hand-out due from a successful artistic endeavour, the creator of that art is the last one to be paid and the first to suffer a shortfall if that endeavour begins to stall. Let’s take books. The writer’s work is on the shelf, sells for £9.99 of which the author, unless he/she has an agent (can’t get an agent ‘til you get a book published, can’t get a book published ‘til you've got an agent) gets 20p of that… Yup, a whole 20p. The fact these ‘helpers’ would have nothing to sell if the writer hadn't written the book has nothing to do with anything;

“It’s the overheads, dear boy…”

The small independent sellers are, on the whole, fairer in their dissection of the profit margins given and received as they’re in a boat of similar build (careful wording there). Ones success is reliant on the other and one also has an opportunity to build a rapport with them that spreads further than the end-of-year balance sheet and the cries of;

“Only sold how many?! At what profit margin?! Drop her/him!”

At a small independent, you can call in for a cup of coffee, talk about the parlous state of the industry, agree that you’ll soldier on and how you can help each other survive…of course they’re not all like this; the boutique-type;

“I do this because I LOVE the literature, dahlink”

types of places where they only want names and faces on their roster do nothing to further the cause…fame groupies and art snobs…but they’re few and far between; thank goodness.

The sad part about all this is that, no matter how we rail about their undue influence and ability to make-and-break we also know they hold the majority of the power. These are the people who lobby the Grammys, the Orange, the Booker, the Emmys, the Academy, the charts, the top ten listers, the best-seller listers, the record play listers, the review writers and retail outlets… So, it came as no surprise to hear that, on this day in 1969, the Hudson’s chain pulled all Elektra records from off’f their shelves, thereby causing Elektra to drop the band, MC5, because MC5 had said, when they heard that Hudson’s had refused to stock their album ‘Kick Out the Jams’;

“Fuck Hudson’s”.

Jesus, talk about sensitive… Are Hudson’s still in business?