Vinyl and pies mash-up is UK retail hit

Steak and ale pies and vinyl records are an unlikely pairing, but one that has proved a hit for the Pie & Vinyl record store and cafe in Southsea.

Since 2012, it has served up vegetarian, vegan and locally sourced meat pies in the front of the shop, and sold newly released records from the back.

Independent record stores have suffered over the past three decades, with their numbers falling from more than 2,000 in the 1980s to just over 300 today, with the big chains and more recently web driving their demise.

But the few plucky survivors, and new entrants such as Pie & Vinyl, have proved to be savvy retailers, turning themselves into places for music-lovers to eat out, watch their favourite bands, and seek refuge from the digital revolution.

A "new breed" of record shop has helped put the sector on a more sustainable footing, according to Kim Bayley, chief executive of the Entertainment Retailers Association, which runs Record Store Day in the UK.

The event, which takes place on Saturday with over 200 participating stores, began in 2008 and has been credited with giving a boost to independent record shops and the vinyl format more generally.

In that period, "the record shop has become a little bit of a broader destination," says Darrel Sheinman, who runs Gearbox Records, an independent record label in London. He credits Rough Trade for pioneering a new kind of record store with wider appeal.

Rough Trade - the UK's pioneering independent store and pivotal in the 1970s punk rock explosion - opened its flagship east London store just a month after music retailer Fopp fell into administration in June 2007. Stephen Godfroy, co-owner of Rough Trade, remembers that at the time "high-street music retail was seen by many as increasingly irrelevant and redundant".

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Mr Godfroy attributes its success to becoming a "destination". The shop puts on regular gigs, serves coffee, stocks books alongside records and has moved away from the old model of "price and convenience", both advantages that record stores quickly lost to online sales.

"It's more acceptable than ever before to offer a hybrid retail experience that offers value in ways other than price discounting," he says.

Rough Trade's fortunes have been helped by the vinyl resurgence. Sales exceeded 1m last year for the first time since 1996, and the value of the vinyl album market reached £25.9m, almost nine times the size in 2008, according to the Entertainment Retailers Association.

While the market is still far smaller than the £163.2m it hit in 1978, the growth has warranted the return of a weekly vinyl sales chart, a sign that the industry's worst days are behind it.

Last year, Sister Ray Records doubled down on the format with a new vinyl-only record store at the Ace Hotel in east London.

The expansion marked a remarkable comeback for the famous Soho record shop, which has traded from the "Golden Mile" of vinyl, Berwick Street, for 30 years.

In 2007, it fell into administration, forcing owner Phil Barton to borrow "tens of thousands" of pounds from his family to buy it back the following year. "I had too much invested in it to give up," he says.

The medicine for Sister Ray's ills was to cut away the fat that had built up over decades of trading and to refocus on records. The shop, right in the centre of London, still had good footfall but the most popular records were often out of stock.

"We stripped everything down to basics and we slowly dragged ourselves back into the game," says Mr Barton.

Out went the racks of DVDs, in came higher-margin second-hand vinyl rarities. "A record store has to find a niche."

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