Why the f*** would we want to open a record shop in Ibiza?
Well, it didn’t come from just waking up one morning with an idea. Selling records and DJing has been a lifelong labour of love, and having a space where vinyl collectors and DJs can hang out and talk about music has been our passion for many years.
Fred (Metropolis) and I have been involved in the record industry for many years. I first knew Fred when he ran a record distribution company in and around London sometime between 1991 and 2002—he was also managing production and distribution for smaller London-based labels. I was buying records and DJing in and around London at that time. Still, working part-time for small independent London-based music businesses such as BBE Music, Rude Awakening Promotions, Release The Groove and more recently, Curved Pressings gave me my well-rounded knowledge of the vinyl industry.
Fred and I became business partners in 2004 and set up Position Normal Distribution. We did it primarily to sell German imports and smaller independent UK labels into the record shops in and around London. Record sales then started to decline with the rise of digital downloads, and one by one, many shops began closing down. It made it almost impossible for anyone to survive by selling new records alone. Record shops’ demise and record-buying culture’s almost disappearance was a sad and challenging time.
In 2005, Fred and I had two kids together, and ast this time, vinyl sales were at an all-time low. Selling new records wasn’t easy anyway; there are no big markups and very little profit, so you have to love it, or it won’t work. Fred and I had about 12,000 records combined in our private collections, so we set up a shop on Discogs to sell our unwanted records and bolted on the new German imports and new releases from the UK-based labels we were distributing. Raising kids while working in London was also becoming more challenging, but by setting up an online shop selling both new and second-hand records, we started to make good sales again and, at one point, were one of Discog’s top ten sellers.
We moved to Ibiza in 2008, and a few years later, we joined forces with a good friend and Discogs seller, Sean Kay. We sold unwanted records from other DJs’ collections as well as our own, including whole and part collections from well-known DJs such as Danny Howells, Sasha, and John Digweed. Sean lived in a warehouse just outside London with all the stock and managed our online sales for around ten years.
But in 2019, Sean’s depression got worse. We had a good relationship with Sean; he was a record geek so when he came out to visit us in Ibiza, we always talked about music, catalogue numbers and other vinyl-related stuff and it helped with his depression. Then, one day, Sean had problems with the warehouse where he was living and where we stored all the records, and he had to move out, so he decided to move to Ibiza with us and run the business together from here. He shipped his office over, and we emptied all the stock from the warehouse and put it into our storage unit in the UK, ready to be boxed up and put on pallets. Sean briefly moved into his mum’s, but his mental health started declining, and he kept stalling his move because he was worried about his depression. Then, one day, we got a phone call from a mutual friend that Sean’s body had been found in a canal near his mum’s house. We don’t know if it was suicide or sleep deprivation, but it was such shocking news. I knew how dark it was for him sometimes, and I just couldn’t help but think that if he made that move sooner, he would still be with us. Then COVID hit a few weeks later, and to add fuel to the fire, we couldn’t even get to the stock in our storage. Having had no sales for months, everything was starting to hit hard, mentally and financially.
Getting through COVID and grieving our mate was a massive struggle. Plus, it took months to get our stock to Ibiza because of all the new lockdown rules. We finally managed to get it boxed up and palletised, but a lot of the stock was mixed up, so once it got to Ibiza, it took us another couple of months to put everything back in order.
We then found a more accessible space in Santa Eulalia to house the 30,000 records so people could pop in and have a dig, and we finally relaunched our shop on Discogs as For The Record Ibiza. We ran our online shop from Santa Eulalia for about two and a half years; until the landlord doubled the rent, which forced us to move again to another warehouse near Santa Eulalia.
It was last year in 2023 when a space next to where I am a resident DJ in Ibiza Town came up for rent. I finally found the perfect space to run a Vinyl Cafe. We opened on the hottest day in July last year (2023), and it soon became a place where we could hang out with other music lovers and where DJs could unearth those vinyl gems and dive into music-related books and art.
For The Record is situated in Sa Penya in Ibiza’s Old Town.
We will be open Wednesday to Saturday from 7 pm in-store, by appointment at our waerehouse and 24 hours online
