We Should Be Talking About Women in the Record Store Business

Story by: Lisa Foster

I am feeling pretty grateful right now.

We are finally seeing some light at the end of the pandemic tunnel. We are welcoming back local customers, some of whom haven’t stepped inside our store in over a year. We’re selling more vinyl. We’ve expanded our methods of reaching people and, with much from our local community, we are experiencing real growth.

It has been a year of intense growth and, quite frankly, one in which I didn’t think very much about my gender in relation to my work life. With doors closed and in-person traffic halted, the usual sexist micro-aggressions ceased. No one was around to ask where my husband was to get an answer to basic questions or tease me about “texting my girlfriends” while I ran media campaigns. I won’t lie. It was nice. Traditionally femme tasks of care — thinking about health and well-being, or even detailed cleaning of spaces — became shared instead of singular burdens. My usual anxieties were an asset. Rules were dope. Shutting the store down to take care of yourself and your staff was punk.

Amidst all this complexity and evolution, the upending of gender norms, the new bodies showing up in our stores, and the incredibly diverse talent and crew who run them, it shocked me recently to hear narratives about independent record stores return to a reliance on white male voices. A recent article checking in with “some of the coolest record stores on the planet” for an “oral history” of how the pandemic had impacted their businesses featured almost entirely men. While I love many of the stores mentioned, and many stories resonate with my own, I was really disappointed to see scant coverage of stores owned by female or Black entrepreneurs.

Owners

Coverage of record stores has been embarrassingly white-male-centric. A December 2018 article in Rolling Stone of the “Top 10” record stores in the country mentions male-owned stores with one exception and cites men’s voices throughout the article. Woman store owners are not unicorns. New stores owned or co-owned by women bourgeoning on the indie store scene. Legacy stores like Peaches in New Orleans, Stinkweeds in Phoenix, and Record Archive in Rochester, New York, are just a few examples of excellent stores owned by women that have been serving their communities for more than two decades.

While inclusivity would be a welcome shift, I’m not optimistic. Too often, I’ve seen women-owned stores grouped together on a list rather than given legitimacy in the scene write large. It seems there’s too much focusing on owners as the ultimate storytellers of record store history in the first place. More (mostly cis-white) men own record stores than anyone else. By a lot. They own more of everything. But that doesn’t mean they are the only voices that hold the authority to narrate the history of record store culture. When a store has been open for at least a few years, it likely has developed an ecosystem all its own. The best store owners, regardless of gender, know that understanding a store’s present and its future lies in the people they employ, the product they stock, and the customers they invite in through their doors.

Staff

Sonidos! Music and More is a new shop in the Washington, D.C. metro area owned by Claudia Mendiola-Duran. In talking with the DCist, Mendiola-Duran echoes much of what women I’ve talked to over the years highlight about opening their own stores: a desire to have more inclusivity in record store culture, autonomy through entrepreneurship, and a middle finger to the sexist music establishment. But another aspect of her story hit me like a wall: Mendiola-Duran had a 15-year history working in DC area record stores. Fifteen years.

Consider how different our knowledge of indie store culture might be if we had included her voice and others like hers without the requirement of ownership. If each article featuring “Top” or “Best” or “Coolest” stores simply paused to interview femme of those record store teams, we’d legitimize women’s voices and see a much more holistic portrait of record store culture. You’d still get to visit legacy stores (Amoeba will always be cool), but you’d learn about them from the viewpoint of the people who are on the front lines of buying, ordering, and serving customers. If you want a summary of what recent Saturdays have been like in our shop, you don’t need to talk to an owner; you need to talk with our staff member, Amber, who manages most Saturdays and has been with Guestroom for more than 7 years.

While many owners are often behind the counter of their stores, at least as many are not, so getting the pulse of what’s actually happening in record stores is likely better accessed from the people who staff them. Jenn D’Eugenio’s blog, Women in Vinyl, gets this. The blog has a simple format, running profiles of women in the vinyl industry, from record stores to pressing plants to sound engineers and more. She covers but doesn’t focus solely on owners, and instead highlights the contributions of femmes across a spectrum of positions within the industry. Recent profiles of Natalie Martinez from Radioactive Records or Annelise Kopp from Harvest Records highlight the immense knowledge and richness of those independent record stores that is absent if we continually return solely to owners’ voices.  If you want to understand record stores in this present moment, talk with the women who have been staffing them. Can’t call up and find a woman member of the shop? Then it’s probably time to rethink what makes a store cool.