Play De Record

Play De Record is an institution. Rare commodities, new releases, and crate gems can be found at Play De Record. Owner Eugene Tam shared a bit of the background and beginnings of Play De Record, as well as his views at the time about records being displaced by different technologies. Note that this interview was conducted in 2011.

Can you tell our readers about yourself and how you got started in the record game?

Hi, I am Eugene Tam. I was born in Trinidad, a country in the West Indies, in the 1970’s. Everyone in Trinidad loves music. My brother and I loved music. When we were young we had those old ghetto blasters and we would listen to music all the time and record everything off the radio that we could.  Once we started working and earning money, we could buy records. My father owned a jukebox store and we used to sell Jukebox 45s, tons! We hooked up with this lady who owned a bunch of jukeboxes and we bought all her records and started selling them.  So I when I came over here to study and when I finished, I wasn’t really doing anything. I tried many different kinds of businesses but nothing was really going well so we decided to open a record store here, at the back of the building. Everyone thought we were crazy because our store was not in the front of the building, facing the street, but the back spaces are cheaper. So we opened a record store and that was how we started out.

Tell us more about the origins of Play De Record, like what year were you guys established and how did you come up with the name?

We opened the store in 1990. As for the name, well, I was so busy trying to set up the store that I had no idea what to name it. Then I just came up with Play De Record because it’s got a west indie vibe to it, you know? And I had a friend design our logo, which is black, red, and white, the colours of Trinidad. So that is how we established the store.   

I am pretty sure that since you opened in the 1990’s till now, the products that you carry have definitely evolved and grown. Tell us a bit about the products you carried when you started off.

When we first started off we only carried records, that’s it. It was just purely records. Then we started selling some hats, some tee-shirts and some jewellery, like hip-hop jewellery, stuff like that. Bling bling, you know? But mainly, it was all records, purely records, and CDs and cassette tapes. 

Speaking of the impact of technology and especially Serato on the record scene and record industry, tell us what the effects of this technology are and how it is changing the whole DJ’ing culture in general? 

For the store, business wise, it changed a lot for us. I think our record sales went down 80% or more. That is why there aren’t any record stores around. There are hardly any record stores around.  Everything is in mp3 format now. DJs don’t use records much anymore now. Drum and Bass DJs only want to use records. Andy C, a top Drum and Bass DJ from England, only uses records. He does not use mp3s at all. But most DJs use mp3s so that has caused the record industry to change a lot.

Are people dropping by Play De Record to sell you their records?

Yeah. People always want to sell their records, like DJs. People are always trying to get rid of their records.

Do you see that as a sad thing because these DJs have been collecting records for so long?

For me, it’s sad. I can feel it in some of them too. They spend so much time digging, because a long time ago, people would spend lots of time to look for records, they had to search for them.

They would travel too.

Yeah, they had to go all over the place. It would take them ten, fifteen, twenty years! Now kids just flip on the computer and get a new CD in two, three minutes.

When people drop stuff off do you sometimes convince them to take it back?

Yeah, because we couldn’t take anymore records. We had like 500,000 records downstairs at one point, and we had to clear them out and sell them because we are building a school.

So where did all these used ones go?

Well, I hate to throw away records.  We try to sell them. We used to have a vintage store right across the road . In fact, that is how we had so many records at one point. A couple stores down from the vintage store across the street was another vintage store that was closing down. We bought that store’s record collection, and there were a few hundred thousand records there. There were some in the attic too. 

And that was the point where you guys had the largest collection ever, right?

Yeah, that was crazy boy. And we only had a certain amount of time to get rid of them, and I couldn’t get rid of them. So what I did was try to give them away at first, but then the date was coming up close, and people wanted to take them, but they had no room. I am talking about a few hundred thousand records.

What is your favourite thing about vinyl records?

You know what, the information on the album covers. Mp3s, there is hardly any information on the cover, you don’t even know who you are listening to sometimes, I think, I don’t know, I don’t really listen to mp3s so I don’t know. I love flipping through records and I like looking at the pictures on the cover. People also love reading the back to see who produced it, the history of the group and the making of the record, and who they thanked. A long time ago, records came with a book of information and through that book you really got to know the group, their history, and the laboured process that went into the creation of each record.