It has been more than a decade since the music industry started reading the funeral rites for the CD, and it still irritates Drew Hill. The music distributor is quick to point out that, more than 30 years after its introduction, the humble compact disc still accounts for two thirds of album sales in Britain and an even higher portion in markets such as Germany and Japan.
“All you hear now is dead CDs, dead CDs. If you allow it to perpetuate, it will become true,” he says, standing in the middle of a distribution centre in south London where 2.5 million CDs and vinyl records are being “picked” by his staff and sent off to all corners of the country. “I challenge anyone to get up to London at 7am and watch us loading up pallets and pallets of music into the UPS vans and tell me physical music is dead.”
Proper, Mr Hill’s company, is one of the last businesses standing in the once-thriving industry of locating and distributing CDs around the country. It does so on behalf of more than a thousand independent record labels and has no trouble shifting its stock, which ranges from cheap-looking CDs of whale songs to deluxe Creedence Clearwater Revival box sets costing hundreds of pounds.
Vinyl, which only a decade ago occupied one lonely shelf in a warehouse in lower Sydenham, south London, now commands a whole purpose-built floor. There are even a few newly released cassette tapes kicking around the shelves.
The so-called death of physical music is also belied by Record Store Day, which took place last month and generates an annual frenzy of activity among music fans and fashion victims alike, desperate to grab hold of limited edition albums. Proper shifted an extra 27,000 units that week, a 150 per cent rise in sales, and was forced to set up temporary stations all over its warehouse. “There was no floor space. It was total chaos.”
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On this day, there is a giant box of fresh Hawkwind albums spilling out on to the floor, most of which Proper’s customers, which range from Amazon to tiny independent record stores, will have no trouble clearing. On a much larger scale, much of Adele’s vinyl and CD output passed through Sydenham on its way to her hordes of fans, so much so that Proper had to install new security to keep it safe. “We can sell truckloads,” says Mr Hill, whose main concern is that a streaming-obsessed industry is shooting itself in the foot. “It’s getting harder to buy a CD player these days.”
Proper is so confident in physical music that it is leaving Sydenham, its home since its inception, and heading to a gigantic new factory in Belvedere, on the eastern fringes of the capital just beyond the Thames Barrier. It is an expensive move for Proper, as shifting vinyl around a warehouse is far more complex than pallets of baked beans. Stacking vinyl can damage the records and the sleeves and will result in the records being sent back. “If a punter pays £20 for a record, it has to be pristine,” says Mr Hill.
That’s a lesson that could have been heeded by City Link, the collapsed courier company, which was located next to Proper’s warehouse and would regularly try to win its business. “We would never, ever use them. We would watch them throwing boxes around and dropping TVs,” Mr Hill says, shaking his head. He is Proper’s managing director, but the business is owned by Malcolm Mills, who founded it almost 30 years ago and these days is more interested in playing drums than running the company.
The company could be seen as merely a logistics operator, in the vein of some of its competitors, but it retains credibility with music fans by running its own small record label that has pedigree in the folk scene, with acts including Bellowhead, who just scored a top 25 spot with a live album, and “heritage” artists including Richard Thompson, Bonnie Raitt and Joan Baez that still have sizeable fan bases and enjoy the freedom of a small label. “I’m not going to tell Richard Thompson how to play the guitar.”
Mr Hill’s own eclectic career includes spells as a DJ and working at several leading record labels, including Disney when it was riding high on the Hannah Montana and High School Musical franchises. “It was like a sausage factory,” he says.
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He hopes that the revival of the record store, with one opening every week in the UK, will justify Proper’s relocation. The Belvedere move will cost up to £2 million to fit out the new factory, equivalent to a year’s profit, so it’s a big bet that the CD market is not heading into oblivion.
“I’m not sticking my head in the sand. Growth will stop at some point, but the physical music market in the UK is worth £600 million. Our revenue is £21.5 million. There is still a long way to run.”