Anna Burnside: the old-fashioned small record store is not dead yet

If the Rezillos' Top Of The Pops, which is playing in the background, was coming from a battered Dansette instead of an iPod Touch, I would swear that Margaret Thatcher was still prime minister.

Love Music, behind Glasgow's Queen Street station, is the kind of record shop in which rebellious teenagers of the late 1970s and early 1980s misspent their youths. Today's young people, in contrast, don't know what to do in the place. The shop was packed with them last week when The View played a short instore show. The tickets cost 5, refundable against any purchase. Owner Sandy McLean recalls: "They walked around, stunned. They didn't recognise anything we sold. They are happy to pay 20 for a gig ticket but don't want to spend 6 on a CD."

This is such a shame. You can't while away a rainy Saturday afternoon flirting with boys, admiring coloured-vinyl limited editions and wondering which Adam and the Ants badge to buy on iTunes.

For those who missed the Gang of Four years, Love Music is a smaller version of Championship Vinyl, as described by Nick Hornby in High Fidelity, but with pungent Glasgow accents and fewer square feet. Hanging out is positively encouraged. Flirting, when McLean generously estimates 80 per cent of his clientele to be male, may be problematic, but all the essential elements for enjoyable, punk rock-based time-wasting are present and correct, dragged into the 21st century in terms of formats and merchandising but stuck at heart in the glory days of vinyl. Gig posters and Blondie and Ramones T-shirts hang in the window. Inside are racks upon racks of LPs, CDs and DVDs. The tiny selection of cassettes is faded and quaint.

You want Malcolm Ross and the Low Miffs' collaborative album? It is up on the wall. Sadly, Rilo Kiley's latest is sold out. Extinction of Mankind's Northern Scum? Coming right up.

Esoterica, special editions and the really expensive kit is on the high shelves. Heavy metal band Rammstein's box set, for example, includes six dildos, individually modelled on members of the band. McLean uncharitably points out the drummer's, the shilpit item in the middle. Astonishingly, he has sold two of these sets at 200 each.The last one is a crazy bargain at 150.

There are also ancient fanzines (I spot one dated autumn 2010), piles of dad rock magazines and Pink Floyd and Sex Pistols tobacco and "stash" tins (sorry officer, no idea). The Ramones and Slipknot mugs were "incredibly popular as stocking stuffers over Christmas", according to McLean. "I sold tons of them for a fiver a pop," he shrugs, his Canadian accent just audible over Nick Lowe. "But they really begrudge 7 or 8 for a CD. That's why I have to stock them." He grins. "You can't download a coffee cup or put a download under the Christmas tree."

The economics of selling music are truly bonkers. Despite being voted Scotland's top independent music store (in a poll organised by IndieRecordShop.org), being an enthusiastic participant in Saturday's Record Store Day, diversifying into mail order, Tweeting like a lark on Dexedrine, inviting The View and their ilk to play live in his window and generally working harder than an unpaid intern at Lib Dem HQ, McLean finds the going tough. His business has dropped 70 per cent over the last few years. And he is one of the lucky ones. Independent record shops are going the same way as country pubs. Over the last five years, one has closed in the UK every three days.

This is why Love Music is no longer the Glasgow branch of Edinburgh-based Avalanche Records. It used to be; McLean was tempted back from Nova Scotia to open in Glasgow's Dundas Street in 1994, and has been in the city ever since. But last year, with Amazon, iTunes, illegal downloads and Spotify chewing chunks out of his market share, paying Avalanche for the name was no longer an option. So it became Love Music: "Same guy, same shop, just don't pay a 20,000 franchise fee any more."

Record companies charge McLean 7.50 for a new CD. He then has to add VAT at 20 per cent. If he sells it for 10, he makes 1. So new releases are a minor part of his business.

The money is in second-hand product, what he calls "the rock'n'roll pawnbroker" end of the business. On cue, several customers appear with carrier bags of CDs. McLean shuffles them like a Las Vegas croupier, rejects anything by Finley Quaye, Kasabian, Oasis and the Scissor Sisters, and makes a generous offer on the rest for exchange, with a bit less for cash.

The nearer the weekend, the more people take the folding stuff. But with McLean's crack eye, 30-worth of second division indie can become a lovely warm 100 sitting in his till.

He still gets excited at a deal. A record fair in Edinburgh last weekend yielded many treasures. "I don't even look at the dearer stuff. I went to the bargain stall. Look!" He produces a pile of dog-eared booty. "A Smiths 12in! Bob Dylan! Quadrophenia double album! A pound each!"

McLean also buys whole collections. Frank Rooney, 37, sold him 1,000 discs earlier this year to fund repairs to his roof. He stands by the rockabilly section, stroking the albums that were once his.Some had not been listened to for a decade. He claims to feel "strangely cleansed" by the process. McLean has also bought entire libraries from music promoters, former DJs, friends who used to work for Trojan Records and have emigrated to the vinyl-unfriendly environment of Abu Dhabi, leaving all their rare reggae behind.

It is this wild and unpredictable mix of formats and musical genres that keeps regulars coming back and new customers coming in. Seventeen-year-old Stephen Darby pops in to rifle through classic rock vinyl. It is his third visit to the shop. He bought his first ever proper album, by Louis Armstrong, in Love Music a few weeks ago. Today he chooses Guns N' Roses' Appetite For Destruction. He has yet to get a record player.

Writer Shug Hanlon, who works in the nearby Strathclyde University library, wanders by in his lunch hour. He looks at Americana, R&B (in the heritage rock sense of the word), blues. Now 55, he admits: "I've bought records all my life, it's difficult to kick the habit. I like independent record shops: you find oddball things, something to take your fancy."

Steven Hunter has walked up Buchanan Street from the Apple Store, where he is assistant manager. Love Music, with its handwritten notices, scuffed paint and random-looking piles of stuff, could not be more different from the halogen-spotlit temple to very expensive digital gadgets where Hunter works. "The staff do think it's strange when I walk in with records. They don't know what they are. They don't need to have that physical thing."

Hunter, 41, does. He admits to being a sucker for an iconic cover and a piece of coloured vinyl. After a heavy browse he and McLean start discussing the one-off merchandise being produced for Record Store Day. McLean pushes the sheet of goodies across the counter. Hunter sucks his teeth. That St Etienne box of 7in singles is calling out to him.

Some of the special stock has already arrived, although McLean must not, on pain of death, sell it before Saturday. He taunts Hunter with Nirvana's Hormoaning, a 12in coloured-vinyl mini-LP. Flipping to the track listing, he points to two covers of songs by the short-lived Glasgow indie band The Vaselines. "They used to be on my record label," says McLean mournfully. "I didn't know anything about publishing deals so I didn't get a publishing credit." Had he done so, the three Vaselines songs covered by Nirvana throughout their career would have meant he never had to drive to Falkirk to price someone's Barbara Dickson rarities ever again.

A lilac-haired rock dude shuffles in with a torn piece of paper. Would it be all right, he asks politely through his lip ring, to put this advert on the pillar in the window? McLean concurs. The Fratelli pole, as it is now known, has history. It is where Jon Fratelli posted an ad looking for musicians to join his band.McLean knew nothing of this legend until he arrived at the shop one morning and found a sheepish Fratelli waiting outside the locked door with an MTV film crew.

In fact, many famous musicians, record collectors and musicians who collect records have passed through Love Music's poster-spotted door. Well-known vinyl obsessive Ian Rankin is a regular customer. Amy Macdonald filmed the video for her single Poison Prince in the shop. KT Tunstall and James Blunt both played instores (as we music industry cognoscenti call them) before they were famous. Fred Schneider, from the B-52s, one of the world's top five record collectors according to McLean, bought 20 CDs on his last visit. "Soul, compilations, he has a good eye for a 1.99 bargain."

And that, from the non-list-making man who admits that High Fidelity reads like his autobiography, is about as big as compliments get.