STORY · REGGAE
Counter to catalogue: how record shops became record labels
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In Jamaica and the diaspora, the retail counter was the A&R department.
The story of how Jamaican record shops read demand at the counter and turned it into labels, studios and hits.
The counter as A&R desk
Before a Jamaican record was a hit it was a stack of 45s on a shop counter, and the person watching which stack moved fastest was often the same person who would press the next one. The record shop as A&R was not a metaphor: at Randy's Record Mart, Vincent and Patricia Chin turned counter demand at 17 North Parade into a studio upstairs and a catalogue that would become VP Records.
Uptown, Herman Chin-Loy read the crowds outside Aquarius in Half Way Tree and translated their taste into forward-thinking productions, while singer-producer Derrick Harriott ran his One Stop shop as the retail face of his Crystal label. Winston Riley's Techniques Record Shop worked the same way, feeding his productions straight to the shelf.
What sold over the counter on Saturday told the producer what to voice on Monday.
The pipeline crossed the Atlantic intact. Greensleeves began as an Ealing import shop before its counter demand became one of reggae's biggest labels, and Dub Vendor grew a Clapham Junction stall into the Fashion label. The distinction between shop, imprint and label was often just a matter of which door you walked through.