If you pay much attention to reports on the state of the independent record retailer in today’s cultural climate, more often than not, most news is bad news. And though Toronto may boast a thriving indie music scene, this past year’s examples of Sam the Record Man shuttering its iconic neon display for good and beloved outpost Penguin Music moving to the basement of vintage clothier Black Market prove that our fair city isn’t immune to the global epidemic of brick-and-mortar rekkid shops going under, crushed by the Godzilla-like combined force of online retailers and downloading.

So it was hard not to break into a cold sweat at the sight of a for-lease sign obscuring the fancy album art in the window of hallowed retailer Rotate This, a fixture on the Queen West strip for almost two decades. Had Godzilla’s wrath decimated our fearless (and frequently intimidating) cult heroes?

Happily, Rotate’s announcement that they’d be leaving their jam-packed home base at 620 Queen W. turned out to be a rare instance of a positive development in record-store land. As long-time employee Kevin Hegge explains, due in no small part to the gradual accumulation of way too much musical product in their cramped shop, Rotate are relocating to more spacious digs mere blocks away — appropriately, they’re moving to the space recently vacated by Songbird Music, at 801 Queen W. In what sounds like a superhuman feat, the Rotate crew plan to be up and running at the new location by June 1.

Considering the skyrocketing rents on Queen West and the current wobbliness of the record industry, it seems remarkable that Rotate are managing to stay in the area. But Hegge, who admits he doesn’t know tonnes of details about the financial side of things (though he notes that he “was under the impression that the rent was gonna be cheaper”), insists that preserving a connection to the neighbourhood was important to him and his colleagues.

“Rotate is almost, like, an esoteric idea more than it’s a concrete place, and where we’re located is part of that, for me. I think that had a huge effect on the choice of location. Y’know, when we were first trying to figure out what we should do and what would be the best space, we considered different parts of town. And then when Songbird closed — maybe it was a bit cheaper, maybe the building was better — most of all, it was the perfect option and it fell into our lap.

“The fact that it was already a music-related store in the area was huge for me, after working here for so long,” Hegge continues. “You get up in the morning and have your coffee, you wave to the old ladies at the Prague Deli. We have hundreds of friendships with both the people in the community and our regulars. People wanted to know we were still in the neighbourhood.”
Hegge, who’s been working at Rotate for “five or six years — I try not to count or I’ll stress out,” acknowledges that he’s seen extreme shifts in the nature of music consumption since he first started out. And though he concedes that even Rotate suffered during the “barren period” in CD sales that coincided with the explosion of MP3s, Hegge claims that, in his experience, there’s been a renaissance of people seeking out actual vinyl (and CDs).

“I started working here at a sort of bridge moment. I remember it was when Belle and Sebastian were really popular, but it was still pretty hard to find their albums. But people seemed really obsessed with music, and with the hunt for obscure records. Right after that, the MP3 thing happened…. My time here has an explicit relationship with technology going mainstream, and I feel like MP3s went from being exciting to being taboo — like, you weren’t supposed to talk about downloading them — and then people started coming back to record stores.

“It’s like when you’re doing banking on the phone, and you spend all this time talking to an annoying creepy robot. You realize you just want to go down to a real bank. At least, I do.” 

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