17 Dec 2013
We’re all far too sensible to be influenced by advertising, right? For sure, all of the choices we made while doing our Christmas shopping this year were entirely rational, not possibly swayed by distant marketers, right? Wrong. Probably. A recent article by Adam Corner in Aeon magazine, called Ad nauseam: The more we hate it, the more it agrees with us. How advertising turned anti-consumerism into a secret weapon got me thinking aboutthe impacts advertisting has on us, and what it all means to our relationship with “stuff”. So I gave him a call.
Adam is a research associate in the school of psychology at Cardiff University, and also works for the Climate Outreach and Information Network. In the context of our month’s theme and reflections on why we continue to consume it with such voracity, his article offered a very illuminating perspective. He writes:
“The industry’s seemingly endless capacity to perpetuate itself matters. Marketing is not simply a mirror of our prevailing aspirations. It systematically promotes and presents a specific cluster of values that undermine pro-social and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour. In other words, the more that we’re encouraged to obsess about the latest phone upgrade, the less likely we are to concern ourselves with society’s more pressing problems. That’s a reason to want to keep a careful tab on advertising’s elusive and ephemeral forms”.
The core argument of the piece is that marketing has developed an approach of pretending to empathise with our frustrations with marketing, and then uses that sense of empathy to sell us more things. I talked to Adam to find out more. He started by telling me where this insight had come from:
“I was listening to the radio one day and an advert for Kopparberg Cider came on, and it was basically lamenting the fact that you “couldn’t get plain old apple cider these days, where have all those apple ciders gone, you used to be able to get good old apple ciders didn’t you?” If there’s anyone who’s done the most to widen out the categories of ciders into all sorts of fruity flavours it’s probably them. Yet they’re using the fact that they flooded the market with fruity ciders to re-introduce the idea of what they call “naked apple cider”. I couldn’t decide whether I was impressed with the complete blatantness of it, or appalled by it. Probably a bit of both, but mainly the latter”.
It led to his thinking that there is now, as he put it:
“a category of advert that wants to put its arm around your shoulder, and sympathise with you, or empathise with you against some kind of problem out there in the world. Often a problem that actually has been caused by the previous activities of either that brand or that company, or other brands. It then uses that connection and that sense of personal identity to say “well why don’t you buy this other product instead, wink wink, nudge nudge”. It’s adverts that want to be your friend. What that does is completely take the sting out of any sense of cynicism, or any sense that maybe you don’t trust these companies, or even anything as dissenting as just not buying their things in the first place, because they’re siding with you against the big bad evil world that’s out there, and just using that empathy to try and make you buy different stuff instead”.
None of us believe advertising has any impact on our shopping decisions at all, yet billions of pounds are spent on it every year. We all believe we are immune, yet clearly we’re not. Advertising no longer works in the sense that you see an advert for baked beans and then 3 weeks later your kitchen cupboards are full of them.
It’s more, according to Adam, that advertising provides “the background buzz and hum that’s just there, accompanying everything that we do”. In terms of those Christmas shopping choices, I asked Adam whether he could ever be sure that his shopping choices this year haven’t been influenced by advertising?
I think you can be sure they they have almost definitely been influenced by the power of advertising somehow! Everyone markets and advertises. Even if we were all to buy each other ethically sourced items and products, they’ve often been promoted through exactly the same routes.
As we’ve become more aware of when someone is making a pitch at us, marketers have had to become more creative, and adverts have become more opaque, more indirect, trying to build a personal rapport, a connection, between us and the advert. As Adam puts it:
It could be things like personalised adverts that try to stoke that idea that there’s some sort of connection between you and the advert. Whether it’s word-matching on internet adverts where they know what you’re searching for and they promote to you that way, which is more of a relatively recent phenomenon, or the idea of adverts trying to empathise with you against the big bad corporate advertising world out there and saying “yeah we know, we’re your friends, we understand that you’re cynical about the world. We understand that you’re cynical about advertising, we get that. We want to share with you that we get that. But at the same time we’re selling this thing that operates outside those terms of reference, so maybe you’d like to buy it, safe in the knowledge that you can be cynical and buying our products at the same time”.
What intrigues me is whether, in a world where action on climate change is needed desperately, yet the fierce consumerism that drives climate change is relentlessly promote through an increasingly skillful advertising industry, it is ever possible that we could avert climate change with the advertising industry operating in the way it does today?
Adam told me:
I don’t think so. I think that for as long as the advertising industry is there telling people what they need to do and what they want to do and what other people who they look up to crucially are doing and are living like, and as long as they are projecting a world to people that is all about very unsustainable, high carbon living, it’s difficult to see how that would be congruent with tackling climate change. .
Part of the reason for that is around values, and the unspoken values that advertising communicates.
Advertising is actually founded on quite a small cluster of values, things like materialism, and not things like collective social decision-making, concern for the environment, things that might have more pro-social outcomes attached to them. It’s this kind of background buzz I think of messages and ideas that tell us that the world is a certain way. They project a certain image of the world to each other, to all of us, so that even if perhaps we think we’re not completely self-interested, we get the very strong message that everyone else is, because why else would there be adverts for the glitziest watch or the snazziest car, it just sets the tone all the thinking that’s done on top of it.
So we could just ban it right? It’s not unheard of. Campaigners in Bristol have already launched a petition to ban advertisers outdoors, under the banner of ‘Bristol: the city that said no to advertising‘. In the US, the states of Maine, Alaska, Hawaii and Vermont have all put restrictions in places, as have 1,500 other towns across the US.
Paris recently reduced outdoor advertising by 30% and banned any advertising within 50 metres of schools. São Paulo in Brazil has banned all advertising in public places. But if we lived in an advertising-free city, I wondered, would we find that we’ve actually lost anything? The benefits would be great, as Neal Lawson wrote in The Guardian last year:
A ban would be aesthetically, culturally and environmentally right. But it’s what it says about us that matters too. It would be a sign of collective and democratic power over the market. It would be a signal that says the public interest trumps private interest. That the freedom to be fully human, and not just be subjected to an endless onslaught of adverts, should come first. That we are citizens more than we are consumers.
For Adam, in spite of thinking that a ban on advertising would mean that “we’d probably gain a bit of mental space”, he feels it would be a huge leap, and probably impossible too. A better place to start, he argues, is with a ban on advertising for children, which he describes as “especially morally questionable”.
Most parents, even if not inclined to see advertising as detrimental to themselves, most would quite quickly agree that it might be nicer if kids weren’t constantly having their arms twisted to by X, Y and Z. If for no other reason it’s ends up being the parents who have to go and buy the stuff anyway! There isn’t really much of a debate about it. It’s one of those debates where if only it would be talked about, I don’t think it would be that radical, but it isn’t really talked about, and like all things that are very ubiquitous, it just drifts along in the background being nice and invisible.
But given the power that advertising clearly has, and the skills and tools that marketers have at their fingertips, rather than binning the whole thing, should we not just learn how to harvest those tool and use them to market the idea that people consume less, become more mindful about climate change, and get involved with things like Transition? Adam thinks not:
“If you adopt these techniques and try and do work that you think would be really socially beneficial, there’s going to be a risk that actually you are barking up the wrong tree, going in the wrong direction. I have written before about the perils of what’s called “social marketing” to engage people on issues like CC. There’s been a big push over the last few decades around promoting positive health behaviours like giving up smoking, and anti-obesity campaigns. There is, to be sure, evidence that social marketing does work, on limited small specific behaviours, but when you apply it to something like climate change where the challenge isn’t just a set of separate discreet behaviours that people can be nudged into doing differently.
When you’ve really got to engage with the underlying rationale and principle of what climate change means, or even broadly sustainability means, it doesn’t seem right that you can ‘sell’ the idea of CC to people in the same way that you could sell soap or dog food. It’s just not that kind of issue. There has definitely been a tendency among governments, and some of the bigger NGOs to reach for marketing people and advertisers to ask them for help with talking to people about climate change. I think it’s wrong-headed, because the principles of selling physical stuff are not the same as the principles of engaging people more deeply in the act of thinking about the challenge of climate change. It’s just not the same thing.
Surely in times of austerity we would see advertising having less of an impact as budgets tighten and people have less disposable income? Adam mentioned a trend he has identified on local radio stations recently:
A huge amount of the advertising is focused on the idea that most people don’t like their jobs and are not very happy in their jobs, they are doing it just to get the money to get to the end of the week. That everyone is in tough times which clearly many people are, that everyone can’t wait until Friday to clock off from their jobs and by the way, this holiday here or this new product should alleviate that. It seems to me the most cynical response to the terrible impacts of austerity and a really inequitable society is that underneath all of that advertising pops up and tries to put its arm around your shoulder.
It says “we know you hate your job, we know you don’t want to do what you’ve been doing, we know you don’t earn enough money”, and then tries to whisk that away with the promoting of a set of products that you are never going to quite have the set of products that you are completely happy with. It’s actively stoking that sense of dissatisfaction at the same time as trying to offer a false solution to it, and I think it’s very cynical.
If you’d like to hear the audio of our discussion, here is the audio that you can either download as a podcast or listen to here:
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16 Dec 2013
Any sense of “we’re all in this together” appears to evaporate when it comes to those industries that use the most amount of energy. If a recent lead editorial in The Times is anything to go by, there’s a sense that they are somehow above all that. But given the scale of the cuts demanded by the climate change science, can any institution or company really be seen as being somehow immune? And is fracking really the golden solution to all our woes? Read on …
The Times piece was called Energy and Jobs: the transformation of America’s energy market is starting to have a direct impact on vital British industries. Its argument was that the rush of cheap gas in the US that has lowered prices means that “British energy-intensive industries, chief among them chemicals manufacture, are becoming uncompetitive”. “The British economy”, they state, “remains yoked to high energy costs and low growth that compare well only with its sluggish European neighbours”.
It gives as an example a PVC company in Runcorn, which used to export to the US but is now increasingly struggling to do so. The solution proposed, in case you didn’t see it coming, is that:
“the Government should, finally, speed up the growth of domestic fracking by boosting incentives for local communities, and urge the US to shun protectionism and export its own cheap shale gas as soon as global markets make it profitable to do so … if the price is that the coalition’s green credentials are further undermined before the next election it is one that must be paid”.
“A price that must be paid?” What? Hold on a second. Let me put that another way. The survival of companies making PVC should take precedence over our reining in our carbon emissions? A quick PVC reality check here. According to the Healthy Buildings Network:
- In virtually all European nations, certain uses of PVC have been eliminated for environmental reasons, and several countries have ambitious programs to reduce PVC use overall
- By-products of PVC production are highly persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic
- PVC production is the largest use of chlorine gas in the world
- Chlorine production for PVC consumes an estimated 47 billion kilowatt hours per year – equivalent to the annual total output of eight medium-sized nuclear power plants
- PVC is one of the most environmentally hazardous consumer materials ever produced
- Its production leads to emissions of dioxins, heavy metals, mercury, lead, ethylene dichloride (EDC) and vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) and diethylhexyl phthalate to name just a few
A 4 degree rise in global temperatures would be,
lest we forget, catastrophic. It is also 3 degrees higher than the level stated in a recent paper by
James Hansen et al. as being the sensible point beyond which to push the climate. Is heading for 4 degrees an acceptable price to pay to keep PVC factories and other similar energy-intensive industries going? We should also remember that the
International Energy Agency have stated that a business as usual scenario would lead to a 6 degree rise.
The editorial proposes that “energy intensive industries should remain exempt from the need to buy costly European carbon ‘allowances'”. Now I’m no expert in “costly European carbon allowances”, but I’d be pretty confident that the very idea of them is that it is “energy intensive industries” who should be affected by legislation intended to reduce energy use. Am I missing something?
As the scientific case for climate change becomes harder and harder to haggle with, sceptics move from “it’s not happening” to “it’s not happening as much as the scientists say” to “it’s too expensive to do anything about”. In this editorial we see the same thing happening with energy. This is beautifully captured in its last line:
“The age of cheap energy may be past, but less expensive energy is still an essential goal”.
Kevin Anderson, one of the organisers, restated at the conference his belief that drastic action is needed to meet the UN’s target of limiting CO2 emissions in order to achieve at 66% possibility of limiting surface temperature increase to 2 degrees. That drastic action consists of a 10% per year cut in emissions. He also noted, as Levy put it, that “the radical emissions had to be made by a small minority. He (Anderson) estimates that ‘1-5% of the population is responsible for 40-60% of emissions'”. I would hazard a guess that PVC manufacturers, such as the Runcorn factory which requires the same amount of electricity as Liverpool (seriously) fall into this category.
Personally, I retain the view that high energy costs are a good thing. It’s not always a view that’s popular or easy to sustain. I’ve been invited onto local radio stations to defend it, only to have sprung on me unannounced a road haulage contractor telling me the impacts high energy prices are having on his business. Fair enough. But high prices also stimulate creativity, adaptation and innovation, as the oil crises of the 1970s so powerfully demonstrate. Low energy prices (even if such a thing were actually possible anymore) stimulate just the kind of complacency and wastefulness that this editorial assumes is still somehow our right.
The key question that arises for me is why are the PVC-makers of this world deemed so immune from the social responsibility that the rest of us are expected to show?
Julie McDowall at Wings over Scotland recently wrote powerfully about working for Serco under a contract to the British Medical Association (BMA) to run their employment law helpline. She writes that although, as far as the world would see, she was working for the BMA:
“The BMA has absolutely no idea who we are: it doesn’t recruit us, it doesn’t train us, it doesn’t pay us, it can’t sack us and it doesn’t know if we’re fairly treated or not. The Serco staff represent the BMA but have nothing to do with the BMA”.
Many of her colleagues were on Zero Hours contracts, and, as she puts it, “they work for a union but have no union of their own”. The piece captures what work is becoming for more and more people in 2013:
“We pretend our mission is to defend doctors, whereas it’s really only to make sure we answer the phone within three rings and don’t go to the toilet”.
But that’s just how it is, because after all, “we’re all in this together”. While everyone else is expected to put up with reduced worker protection, Zero Hours contracts, being chastised for using benefits to fill the gaps between periods of low-paid employment, seeing public sector jobs being shifted into the private sector with the resultant loss in worker protection and wages, we are, according to The Times anyway, expected to believe that no such flexibility should be demonstrated to “British energy-intensive industries”, however polluting, PVC companies included.
The Times puts all its eggs in one basket, fracking, arguing that we must have fracking so we can keep business-as-usual on the road and remain competitive in the global economy (David Cameron’s tweets regularly close with the hashtag #GlobalRace). But where’s the space for asking “what if there is not to be a ‘shale gas revolution’ in the UK? Not because of a lack of government commitment or ‘incentives’ (for which read ‘bribes’) for local communities, but because it’s a dream, a bubble, a fantasy? The idea that the US will ever be able to “export its own cheap shale gas as soon as global markets make it profitable to do so” is a deeply deluded myth, as David Hughes’
‘Drill Baby Drill’ report identifies.
Does British industry, founded on the creative problem-solving genius of people like Brunel, really have no response to the
inevitable rise in energy prices other than throwing a sulk and threatening to leave and go elsewhere? Has the ingenuity that turned its manufacturing industry around on a sixpence in the run up to World War 2 evaporated entirely? The Times editorial reeks of a belligerent refusal to be creative, a sense that somehow the inevitable can be avoided. Meanwhile the world passes 400ppm, the hurricanes gain new momentum and the Arctic ice melts. In the interview with
Adam Corner that I will publish tomorrow, I ask him if staying below 2 degrees is possible with an intact advertising industry, he states:
The advertising industry has to be brought under control, as do lots of other types of industries. As long as the advertising industry is there telling people that what they need to do and what they want to do and what other people who they look up to crucially are doing and are living like, and as long as they are projecting a world to people that is all about very unsustainable, high carbon living, it’s difficult to see how that would be congruent with tackling climate change.
Put alongside that a range of other industries and players, including the media, “energy intensive industries” and PVC companies. I understand that we are talking about peoples’ jobs here. But surely large employers in energy-intensive industries have even more responsibility to move with the times, to adapt and evolve. Anything less, when the writing is so clearly on the wall energy-wise, is grossly irresponsible.
Editorials such as this do no-one any favours. As Naomi Klein told the Radical Emissions Reductions conference, we need “a radical, enabling environment in which these policies can flourish”. Transition is just one of many manifestations of this. One cornerstone of such an environment will have to be that no-one is immune from change, least of all those energy-intensive companies most to blame for creating this mess in the first place.
I’ll leave the last word to Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales, who was on Desert Island Discs this weekend. She said “killing something so precious is not to our advantage”. Although I’m not holding my breath, they’re words that I hope the leader writers of the Times might bear in mind next time they sit down to compose any subsequent lead editorials related to energy.
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12 Dec 2013
The Drift Record Shop describes itself as “an immaculately curated independent music specialist based right in the heart of the Devon countryside”. Picking up on Ruth Potts’ suggestion yesterday that “wherever practical and possible develop lasting relationships with things by having and making nothing that is designed to last less than 10 years”, we thought it might be good to pop into Drift for a chat. We spoke to Rupert Morrison, who runs the shop, to hear more about the vinyl revival and what it tells us about how people relate to artifacts of beauty.
One of the things that’s been quite marked in music over the last few years has been the return of vinyl back from the dead pretty much. What does that tell us about how people’s relationship with music and how they buy it is changing do you think?
For us, we’ve probably sold about as much vinyl now as we always have. It’s just a case that the awareness is drastically different. Things like Record Store Day and Black Friday have just passed, stations like 6 Music and The Guardian have been particularly supportive as well. The awareness of the format of vinyl, the awareness of independent retailers, the awareness of actually going and buying a record from a local record shop has become a hugely supported thing and I think in this sector, more than any other sector. You don’t get a network of shoe shops or even book shops, which would seem like a very logical thing, coming together under an umbrella of marketing and support. It’s really just awareness.
More vinyl is being pressed now than for the last couple of decades. The prices are better, the availability is a bit better. But the best part, we always stock a comparable amount and certainly sell a comparable amount, but it’s nice that people want to come and get involved and maybe we’re diversifying in terms of demographics that are getting into it, particularly younger people, the kids.
And why do people buy it?
Vinyl? Because it sounds better. Because it makes them look cool. That’s what it’s all about isn’t it? It’s been an easy sell to people. It’s bigger. You’ve got a CD, whereas vinyl’s four times bigger, it’s bigger artwork and you buy it and carry it around and people know you’ve bought something. You can talk about analogue and how that’s what you’re into.
You can look at shops like Urban Outfitters, they’re very canny and their ability to track zeitgeists is second to none. They started selling Nirvana and Sub Pop and Sonic Youth t-shirts around 7 or 8 years ago, and suddenly everybody’s doing that and grunge is back with the kids and now they’re even covering that kind of stuff on X-Factor.
As soon as they started selling copies of hip-hop records, so NWA has just been reissued today. As soon as those records started appearing in firstly Urban Outfitters, I think Topshop even sells a few records now, it’s fashion. It’s a fashion thing and that’s why it’s been such an easy sell.
But the actual brass text of why a lot of people buy vinyl is because it’s a great format to listen to music on. I think that again it’s a slightly easy sell to people to invest in physicality when that physicality’s a bit impressive. It’s big. It’s a huge physical thing that you can hold. I think that’s why.
What’s the difference with something like if you bought, say, Metal Box by Public Image Limited on CD or had it as three or four 12 inches in the actual metal box? You make music as well (Rupert records as R.G. Morrison) and when you make music to be on a CD as a long list of tracks, how different is it, as an artist, when you’re preparing something you know’s going to be on vinyl with 2 sides, 4 sides, 6 sides or whatever?
When we were writing the new record, we programmed it as 2 halves, so it wasn’t just a case of “that’s about the half way mark and which side does the last track fall on, that’s the first five and that’s the second five”. Traditionally always the track 7 is the strong track because it’s the flip, it’s the first track on the B side. You do have to programme things in a certain way. I know a lot of my friends and peers who are in bands actually write in the context of 2 sides, or 4 sides if they’re on a slightly more affluent label! Not to suggest my label aren’t, it just doesn’t require 4 sides.
I think traditionally it’s a format that musicians have grown up with. It’s existed for longer than any of us so the fact that it’s still here is why it’s such an enduring format. The most important records that I own are always on vinyl even though I probably own more CDs and cassettes than I own vinyl. It’s just that that’s always been a cheaper format and a bit more throwaway, so I just, growing up, had all three. But I haven’t got a tape player at the moment. I’ve got lots of boxes!
I think in terms of the quality of actual audio, if you’ve got a good amplifier then you’ll hear the difference. If you’ve got a good stylus you’ll hear the difference. But I think realistically a lot of the more domestic, budget players won’t make that much difference in quality between CD and vinyl. But there’s always a process of how you consume that music. It’s not as easy as to skip forward. There’s certainly no shuffling and you do pretty much have to sit and listen to something and then flip it over and listen to the other tracks. I think when everything’s so disposable and at your fingertips, it’s a different way of consuming music. I think you tend to listen more. I think that’s had an impact as well.
I was watching a video on the Erased Tapes website all about vinyl and what they do, the care and the artistry they put into that, creating these beautiful, beautiful things. What’s your sense of how vinyl has become something that’s really just gorgeous and exquisite?
Those guys are a slight exception because they’re all based in Berlin and they’re completely mad, eccentric German guys who have put themselves in a position where they can do that. But there’s a certain fetish element. With things like Record Store Day, there’s certain customers who queue up and come in who we see once a year, they turn up on Record Store Day and are buying things based on what they’re told is the exclusive nature of the element.
It’s a more laborious process, making vinyl. It’s kind of like alchemy, in terms of mastering the records. There’s so many different factors. It’s a very artisan thing and it’s a finalising part of the process which has been the recording process. Vinyl mastering engineers are amazing. The guy who masters my records, a great guy called Noel Somerville, mastered the Boards of Canada records. He did such a good job when they first made those records making the plates that he pointed out that there isn’t really any point in him remastering those records from tapes, just get the plates he made. As soon as he said that and went ahead with it, he realised that he’d done himself out of a couple of days of studio time!
With somebody like Noel’s work, he went through the process 15 years ago. Those physical plates, they got them, they pressed them, and those records still sound fantastic. It’s a complicated thing, it’s not quite the same as just flattening audio and putting it on CD. It’s an artisan thing.
In terms of packaging, vinyl is bigger. There’s a guy locally, I think it’s called Live Work Unit. What he actually produced for his CD packaging was amazing. It was almost like an A3 size poster that he’d worked out how to carefully fold down so it formed the shell of the packaging. There were tracing paper inserts, it was a really beautiful thing. So you can put that attention in, but in terms of mass producing something, it’s different economics isn’t it?
What difference does it make for a small, independent shop like you as part of a local economy like this? Does it feel like one of the things that’s an essential part of the mix that distinguishes you from, say, Fopp?
I think the biggest thing with us is our actual process of presenting things. Realistically, you could go into our shop or go into any number of independent record shops today and the same records have just come out and will be on the racks. We get the same press releases so if they felt like talking about it they’d probably say the same things, they’d probably play the same records. There’s a fair chance you could go into any of those independents and pick up the same records today, so it’s about how we curate what we get in.
We certainly don’t take everything, I’d say we only take about a third of what’s actually offered to us. There’s a huge amount available and I think a big part is the curating process. In terms of getting people to come in, having limited stock and exclusive stock helps, and they tend to be a bit more expensive so selling those units can certainly help in terms of having a slightly quieter day.
We’re not particularly close to any of the big retailers like HMV or Fopp. Plymouth and Exeter still have HMV shops but I don’t think it really affects us a great deal to be honest. I certainly wouldn’t want them to go. I think HMV is run terribly, and I think the people who have been put in a position to do so are complete idiots and they’ve proved themselves to be incompetent and inept beyond belief, but they’re still there and I just hope that the goodwill they’ve been shown and the support they’ve been shown by distributors and labels that they turn a corner and you do still have a large physical high street retailer.
We’re lucky that we’re able to do what we do where we do it, but there are lots of places that you can’t just rock up and take a fairly big shop space and do something as decadent as we’re doing, because the overheads are just not viable and even someone like HMV are going to get driven out of that equation, and it’ll just become a Primark. You then won’t have that physical retailing and it becomes the norm that people don’t physically see things, which feels like a sad situation to me.
One of the things that you do so beautifully here is the love and care that you put to the Deluxe newspaper that you do and the booklet of the 2013 Records of the Year, it’s all so beautifully designed. What is that ingredient, do you think? Is it just that the people who run the shop are music nerds?
Rupert’s mum: What we set out to do was produce the best shop we could and produce a shop that we would want to walk into, and I think that makes the difference.
There was someone on Twitter the other day (@willrobertcen) who said “if Santa had a grotto it would look like this” (and posted the photo below). That’s something really magical. If you love music, it’s really nice.
!["If Santa had a grotto it would look like this".](https://www.transitionculture.org/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/7421e9e507_santadrift.jpg ""If Santa had a grotto it would look like this".")
We’re very lucky in that we’re able to do it. I don’t say that lightly because it’s a really difficult time. I think globally people are feeling it, so even when you scale it right back to problems of traffic directions and getting people to physically come into the shop, it’s a really hard thing to do and a really hard time to do it. We are supported, and we’re very grateful to be given the time and opportunity to do that but I think as soon as you don’t care about this, it is a job and we are geared around commerce, that’s what we’re here for.
Although it’s nice to have information written on the front of the CDs and booklets produced about things, it’s produced as a mechanism to make the process more svelte, for people to come in and find what they’re after and spend money, because that’s what we’re here for. But at the same time, it’s not got huge profit margins. If we were interested in making huge amounts of money then I think we’d be running off t-shirts and hitting the mechanisms and models that much more successful people do. It’s about loving that we do it. We’re not looking to become as big as Fopp because as soon as you do, you lose the part that we enjoy doing so much. So long as we accept that there’s not any retiring, we’re happy to keep on keeping on.
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12 Dec 2013
The Drift Record Shop describes itself as “an immaculately curated independent music specialist based right in the heart of the Devon countryside”. Picking up on Ruth Potts’ suggestion yesterday that “wherever practical and possible develop lasting relationships with things by having and making nothing that is designed to last less than 10 years”, we thought it might be good to pop into Drift for a chat. We spoke to Rupert Morrison, who runs the shop, to hear more about the vinyl revival and what it tells us about how people relate to artifacts of beauty.
One of the things that’s been quite marked in music over the last few years has been the return of vinyl back from the dead pretty much. What does that tell us about how people’s relationship with music and how they buy it is changing do you think?
For us, we’ve probably sold about as much vinyl now as we always have. It’s just a case that the awareness is drastically different. Things like Record Store Day and Black Friday have just passed, stations like 6 Music and The Guardian have been particularly supportive as well. The awareness of the format of vinyl, the awareness of independent retailers, the awareness of actually going and buying a record from a local record shop has become a hugely supported thing and I think in this sector, more than any other sector. You don’t get a network of shoe shops or even book shops, which would seem like a very logical thing, coming together under an umbrella of marketing and support. It’s really just awareness.
More vinyl is being pressed now than for the last couple of decades. The prices are better, the availability is a bit better. But the best part, we always stock a comparable amount and certainly sell a comparable amount, but it’s nice that people want to come and get involved and maybe we’re diversifying in terms of demographics that are getting into it, particularly younger people, the kids.
And why do people buy it?
Vinyl? Because it sounds better. Because it makes them look cool. That’s what it’s all about isn’t it? It’s been an easy sell to people. It’s bigger. You’ve got a CD, whereas vinyl’s four times bigger, it’s bigger artwork and you buy it and carry it around and people know you’ve bought something. You can talk about analogue and how that’s what you’re into.
You can look at shops like Urban Outfitters, they’re very canny and their ability to track zeitgeists is second to none. They started selling Nirvana and Sub Pop and Sonic Youth t-shirts around 7 or 8 years ago, and suddenly everybody’s doing that and grunge is back with the kids and now they’re even covering that kind of stuff on X-Factor.
As soon as they started selling copies of hip-hop records, so NWA has just been reissued today. As soon as those records started appearing in firstly Urban Outfitters, I think Topshop even sells a few records now, it’s fashion. It’s a fashion thing and that’s why it’s been such an easy sell.
But the actual brass text of why a lot of people buy vinyl is because it’s a great format to listen to music on. I think that again it’s a slightly easy sell to people to invest in physicality when that physicality’s a bit impressive. It’s big. It’s a huge physical thing that you can hold. I think that’s why.
What’s the difference with something like if you bought, say, Metal Box by Public Image Limited on CD or had it as three or four 12 inches in the actual metal box? You make music as well (Rupert records as R.G. Morrison) and when you make music to be on a CD as a long list of tracks, how different is it, as an artist, when you’re preparing something you know’s going to be on vinyl with 2 sides, 4 sides, 6 sides or whatever?
When we were writing the new record, we programmed it as 2 halves, so it wasn’t just a case of “that’s about the half way mark and which side does the last track fall on, that’s the first five and that’s the second five”. Traditionally always the track 7 is the strong track because it’s the flip, it’s the first track on the B side. You do have to programme things in a certain way. I know a lot of my friends and peers who are in bands actually write in the context of 2 sides, or 4 sides if they’re on a slightly more affluent label! Not to suggest my label aren’t, it just doesn’t require 4 sides.
I think traditionally it’s a format that musicians have grown up with. It’s existed for longer than any of us so the fact that it’s still here is why it’s such an enduring format. The most important records that I own are always on vinyl even though I probably own more CDs and cassettes than I own vinyl. It’s just that that’s always been a cheaper format and a bit more throwaway, so I just, growing up, had all three. But I haven’t got a tape player at the moment. I’ve got lots of boxes!
I think in terms of the quality of actual audio, if you’ve got a good amplifier then you’ll hear the difference. If you’ve got a good stylus you’ll hear the difference. But I think realistically a lot of the more domestic, budget players won’t make that much difference in quality between CD and vinyl. But there’s always a process of how you consume that music. It’s not as easy as to skip forward. There’s certainly no shuffling and you do pretty much have to sit and listen to something and then flip it over and listen to the other tracks. I think when everything’s so disposable and at your fingertips, it’s a different way of consuming music. I think you tend to listen more. I think that’s had an impact as well.
I was watching a video on the Erased Tapes website all about vinyl and what they do, the care and the artistry they put into that, creating these beautiful, beautiful things. What’s your sense of how vinyl has become something that’s really just gorgeous and exquisite?
Those guys are a slight exception because they’re all based in Berlin and they’re completely mad, eccentric German guys who have put themselves in a position where they can do that. But there’s a certain fetish element. With things like Record Store Day, there’s certain customers who queue up and come in who we see once a year, they turn up on Record Store Day and are buying things based on what they’re told is the exclusive nature of the element.
It’s a more laborious process, making vinyl. It’s kind of like alchemy, in terms of mastering the records. There’s so many different factors. It’s a very artisan thing and it’s a finalising part of the process which has been the recording process. Vinyl mastering engineers are amazing. The guy who masters my records, a great guy called Noel Somerville, mastered the Boards of Canada records. He did such a good job when they first made those records making the plates that he pointed out that there isn’t really any point in him remastering those records from tapes, just get the plates he made. As soon as he said that and went ahead with it, he realised that he’d done himself out of a couple of days of studio time!
With somebody like Noel’s work, he went through the process 15 years ago. Those physical plates, they got them, they pressed them, and those records still sound fantastic. It’s a complicated thing, it’s not quite the same as just flattening audio and putting it on CD. It’s an artisan thing.
In terms of packaging, vinyl is bigger. There’s a guy locally, I think it’s called Live Work Unit. What he actually produced for his CD packaging was amazing. It was almost like an A3 size poster that he’d worked out how to carefully fold down so it formed the shell of the packaging. There were tracing paper inserts, it was a really beautiful thing. So you can put that attention in, but in terms of mass producing something, it’s different economics isn’t it?
What difference does it make for a small, independent shop like you as part of a local economy like this? Does it feel like one of the things that’s an essential part of the mix that distinguishes you from, say, Fopp?
I think the biggest thing with us is our actual process of presenting things. Realistically, you could go into our shop or go into any number of independent record shops today and the same records have just come out and will be on the racks. We get the same press releases so if they felt like talking about it they’d probably say the same things, they’d probably play the same records. There’s a fair chance you could go into any of those independents and pick up the same records today, so it’s about how we curate what we get in.
We certainly don’t take everything, I’d say we only take about a third of what’s actually offered to us. There’s a huge amount available and I think a big part is the curating process. In terms of getting people to come in, having limited stock and exclusive stock helps, and they tend to be a bit more expensive so selling those units can certainly help in terms of having a slightly quieter day.
We’re not particularly close to any of the big retailers like HMV or Fopp. Plymouth and Exeter still have HMV shops but I don’t think it really affects us a great deal to be honest. I certainly wouldn’t want them to go. I think HMV is run terribly, and I think the people who have been put in a position to do so are complete idiots and they’ve proved themselves to be incompetent and inept beyond belief, but they’re still there and I just hope that the goodwill they’ve been shown and the support they’ve been shown by distributors and labels that they turn a corner and you do still have a large physical high street retailer.
We’re lucky that we’re able to do what we do where we do it, but there are lots of places that you can’t just rock up and take a fairly big shop space and do something as decadent as we’re doing, because the overheads are just not viable and even someone like HMV are going to get driven out of that equation, and it’ll just become a Primark. You then won’t have that physical retailing and it becomes the norm that people don’t physically see things, which feels like a sad situation to me.
One of the things that you do so beautifully here is the love and care that you put to the Deluxe newspaper that you do and the booklet of the 2013 Records of the Year, it’s all so beautifully designed. What is that ingredient, do you think? Is it just that the people who run the shop are music nerds?
Rupert’s mum: What we set out to do was produce the best shop we could and produce a shop that we would want to walk into, and I think that makes the difference.
There was someone on Twitter the other day (@willrobertcen) who said “if Santa had a grotto it would look like this” (and posted the photo below). That’s something really magical. If you love music, it’s really nice.
We’re very lucky in that we’re able to do it. I don’t say that lightly because it’s a really difficult time. I think globally people are feeling it, so even when you scale it right back to problems of traffic directions and getting people to physically come into the shop, it’s a really hard thing to do and a really hard time to do it. We are supported, and we’re very grateful to be given the time and opportunity to do that but I think as soon as you don’t care about this, it is a job and we are geared around commerce, that’s what we’re here for.
Although it’s nice to have information written on the front of the CDs and booklets produced about things, it’s produced as a mechanism to make the process more svelte, for people to come in and find what they’re after and spend money, because that’s what we’re here for. But at the same time, it’s not got huge profit margins. If we were interested in making huge amounts of money then I think we’d be running off t-shirts and hitting the mechanisms and models that much more successful people do. It’s about loving that we do it. We’re not looking to become as big as Fopp because as soon as you do, you lose the part that we enjoy doing so much. So long as we accept that there’s not any retiring, we’re happy to keep on keeping on.
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11 Dec 2013
Ruth Potts is the co-author, with Andrew Simms, of a pamphlet called The New Materialism, founder of Bread, Print and Roses, and organiser of the recent ‘Festival of Making’. She describes her work as “inviting people to fall in love with stuff in a good way”. We sat down with Ruth under a tree in the Healthy Futures garden in Totnes to pick her brains about materialism, “stuff” and what a new relationship with stuff could look like.
What’s wrong with materialism Ruth? Surely people only buy iPads because they need them?
I guess what we’re saying in the pamphlet is that there isn’t anything wrong with materialism. We are after all part of a material world. We live in a physical world, we’re part of that physical world. But we think materialism has become synonymous with a sort of passive and destructive consumerism so that we are persuaded, to paraphrase the economist Tim Jackson, to buy stuff we don’t need often for people that we don’t really like in order to create an impression that won’t last.
We’ve been persuaded, in an economy that is driven by the need to produce ever more, to buy stuff that doesn’t make us happy. We’ve been caught in a hedonic treadmill in which we’re constantly chasing the next thing. I think that the response of the Green movement to date has been either this hair-shirt miserablism where we’re told that we ought to reject stuff altogether, or it’s been replacing one kind of fairly unhappy consumerism with another, so you can have a Prius, you can have your designer shoes, your Jimmy Choos, as long as they’ve got a bit of recycled material in the sole.
I think there’s another way that we could be approaching this and I think the Green movement has been missing a trick, because actually the Green movement has distilled a different kind of materialism for decades. We know that living within our means both socially and environmentally involves things like repairing more, reimagining things we already have, recycling and many other activities prefixed with ‘re’.
The Green movement knows how to live better and I think the exciting thing about this is that by mending and caring for the stuff we already have, we enter into a different relationship with stuff which is about long-term lasting caring relationships rather than the slightly abusive consumer relationship.
The added benefit of that in the context of the current situation where we’re entering a period of austerity where the government is telling us to get out of the debt crisis at least in terms of household debt in the UK by buying more stuff, which isn’t making us happier and is getting us further into debt.
If you look at the type of economy that we could have, which is based on repairing what we have, repairing things from scratch, making things from recycled materials, it’s an economy that is rich in employment and I think it’s a real answer to a situation where everybody agrees that to stabilise the economy you need to increase demand and this is a way of increasing demand for services, for doing things, in a way that doesn’t also and in fact could decrease consumption.
Isn’t that shift to an economy based on all the different ‘re’s that you mentioned one that would bring economies such as ours to its knees?
I don’t think it would. I think it’s one that is rich in employment actually. It’s an economy that calls for practical people and artists in equal measure, so you’d see a huge rise in employment in repair and maintenance for example, so everything from plumbers to painters and bakers. It’s actually a richer, more diverse economy, and an economy which replaces the impoverishment of work; the impoverishment of the call centre and the relatively stripped-bare employment, types of employment that are satisfying and rich in social connections.
I think there is everything to be gained by switching from an economy that’s built on ever rising levels of consumption to one that’s based on repair, maintenance and doing things together.
We all have a relationship with stuff. We all have stuff in our lives. What does a healthy relationship with stuff look like? I like one of the things in your Manifesto for the New Materialism that says you shouldn’t buy anything that’s not going to last less than 10 years. What does our relationship with stuff, the contents of our house, look like in a world of new materialism?
In a New Materialist world, we would have things that we repair rather than throw away. We wouldn’t have constant upgrades. If we think about it in terms of our social relationships, what we all ultimately seek is meaningful and lasting relationships and I think that can be applied to stuff. Rather than having situations where the moment we buy something there’s a new must-have model, I think we’re looking for a world where perhaps, as they once did, our washing machines last a lifetime. I think the oldest working fridge is something like 93 years old.
It’s a culture where we build memories around the things we have in our homes. We care for them and we repair them. It’s where, in the words of Erich Fromm, buying things is ‘keeping it’ buying and where we actually have control over things that we have. I’m sure many of us have experienced the frustration where one tiny element in a toaster blows and the whole thing has to be scrapped because we can no longer access the parts that we need in order to repair it. It’s getting back to a stage where we have both a relationship with but also control over the things that we have, so we’re not just passive consumers but we’re actively engaged with our things.
I think you can already see that emerging, from the culture of repair, furniture recycling projects that are springing up all over the country to the rather fantastic Restart project whose strapline is ‘don’t despair, repair’, who are teaching people how to mend and care for and make last perhaps some of the things that have become the most high-velocity in the modern economy. Things like our laptops and our mobile phones. There’s a huge satisfaction in making things last actually.
You recently had a Festival of Making here in Totnes. How did it go?
The Festival of Making came because this is such a period of consumption and shopping, the run-up to Christmas is all about how many shopping days there are left til Christmas. We just thought it would be fun to put a Festival of Making in the heart of the Totnes high street, so we hired Totnes Civic Hall for a day and we invited local makers and craftspeople and re-makers to come and share their skills for an afternoon. We had people learning how to spin yarn that they could then knit, learning how to bake, learning how to weave containers from recycled tetra paks, people carving bows and arrows. We had a whole range of activities going on.
One of the beautiful reflections that came from that was the woman who’d been teaching people how to spin said that she had taught people not only from Totnes but also, because Totnes has a Language School, people from around the world learnt how to spin. She’d sent them off home with their spindles and with a quantity of yarn so that they could carry on that practice and teach others.
She very much hoped that we had on that day ignited something of a passion for making in everyone who came through the hall, and it was a beautiful afternoon. It was buzzing and it was alive and people were chatting and learning from one another and really enjoying themselves.
George Monbiot wrote a great article this week about Christmas. There is of course a whole industry that makes us desire that stuff. Nobody felt they needed an iPad before iPads were invented. How do we overcome that powerful commercial brainwashing?
I think there are very strong and powerful arguments for restrictions to advertising, because advertising is the medium which, in the words of Edward Bernays, one of the founding fathers of the modern advertising industry, is about “trying to convince somebody who is a nobody what they’re a somebody”. I think that’s a really miserable way of looking at people actually.
In the words of Virginia Woolf, “there are no such thing as ordinary people”. So yes, restrictions on advertising, but what we were trying to get at with The New Materialism was that the moment that we start to enter into a relationship with the things that we have by caring for them and repairing them, actually we reduce some of the lure of that advertising, because we don’t want to give up things that we love. By learning to repair what we have, part of that is that it could make us immune to advertising and satisfied with what we have.
I think George Monbiot is exactly right to point out that Christmas is one of the points of the year where this mass consumer treadmill goes into absolute overdrive and we’re convinced not only that we have to buy something for everybody but that we have to spend hundreds of pounds that in the current climate or if ever, people don’t have. This is why we are experimenting this year by making the run up to Christmas a ‘Make Something Month’.
We’re encouraging people just to have a go at one thing, because we think that the more that we make for one another in the run up to Christmas, actually the more we’re going to spend time with people because often making involves asking advice off other people, learning from others, and there’s a chance that we might all arrive at Christmas a bit happier and a bit less in debt.
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