Adrians Records. (Store Of The Week).

Adrian Rondeau, Owner & Founder

"The summer has been a little quiet, but there is no point worrying about that. It is always quiet this time of the year, but there is no point standing behind the counter with a cup of coffee and moaning. We think it is a good time to plan for the future--you have to use the quiet times to prepare for the busy times. We have been generally having a jolly good spring clean. We have been rearranging the racks, renewing sections and resiting the DVDs.

I think the autumn schedule is shaping up quite well. We haven't had news of everything yet--the new Robbie Williams album will be very interesting, if it comes.

But, yes, it has been a quiet summer. I think it is as much to do with the supermarkets taking more and more of the business as anything else. All the campaigns are becoming more difficult too. Mid-price has been done to death now--you can only sell the same things a certain amount of times without getting diminishing returns.

The support for indies is declining too. The majors say they support the indies, but they don't really. I don't want to be too negative, because some of the companies behave very positively. EMI is an exception--they are very co-operative--and Pinnacle and Sony are good. But, I do think that as an industry we do shoot ourselves in the foot a little.

Although the industry says they need the independents to break new acts, I don't feel that they work with the indies. The attitude of some companies towards independent shops is very old fashioned--if you support them on a new project, that's fine, but if you get stuck with something, they don't want to help out.

Something like an Eva Cassidy is big for us, Because we are on the high street, and we have a big high-street ...