Style: August 05, 2022

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28 <strong>Style</strong> | Feature Record sales Having bought the business the year Elvis Presley died, owners of Dunedin’s longest surviving music retailer Disk Den reflect on 45 years in the music store game. Words Bruce Munro Photos Linda Robertson Hing Chin stands next to a display of vinyl album covers spanning diverse centuries, continents and musical tastes. Behind him is a wall bearing hundreds of brand new, decades-old cassette tapes. Wearing blue jeans, a grey jersey and a quiet smile, Hing glances through to the other half of the large store where a solitary customer browses shelves of compact discs (CDs). ‘‘Record buyers are probably the best customers you could hope to get,’’ Hing says. He recalls one guy, in the early 1990s, who came into Disk Den and bought a double album. A couple of days later, the man returned with the records buckled. He said he had been sold ‘‘a dud album’’ and wanted his money back. Hing was baffled and asked the customer if he might have left the album near a heater or in the back of a car – anywhere it might have been exposed to heat. No, the man replied. ‘‘He was adamant and he was quite a big guy and I didn’t feel like arguing with him. So, I just refunded his money.’’ Three years ago, for the first time in more than a quarter of a century, the same customer walked back through the same Princes St doors. ‘‘He came in and said, ‘I owe you an apology’.’’ There had been a situation that could have caused the records to buckle. It had played on his mind through the years and he wanted to make amends. A double LP back then would have cost between $9.95 and $16.95. Hing told the man he could give him $10. ‘‘He said, ‘No, I also owe you the interest on that’. He insisted that I accept $50.’’
<strong>Style</strong> | Feature 29 Disk Den, 118 Princes Street. The music store with a vintage double window frontage displaying Adele posters, Roy Orbison albums and Led Zeppelin t-shirts has long been a walk-in time capsule. But it is also a more than six decade long, living thread in the warp and weft of Dunedin’s music fabric. Owned by Hing and Noni Chin for the past 45 years, Disk Den was, at one time, at the forefront of record retailing in New Zealand. It also gained an international reputation as the go-to store for Dunedin Sound music. Today, as the eldest of this generation of Chins prepares to retire, their store at the quiet, homely end of town is a changeless monument to a lost era. But it remains a much-remembered, deeply significant institution in the lives and memories of music-lovers throughout the country and around the globe. It was 1977. Hing was 26 and preparing for his OE, his first overseas trip since arriving in New Zealand from Guangzhou, China, as a 3-year-old, in 1953. ‘‘My father noticed the business was for sale,’’ Hing recalls of what was then called Russell Oaten’s Disk Den, in Rattray Street. He said, ‘You should go and have a look’. So I had a look, and there we go.’’ Hing says he planned to run the music store, which had been started by Russell Oaten 18 years previous, for a couple of years ‘‘and then flick it off’’. The first year, Hing increased the profit. ‘‘So we stayed for another year. And next year, we exceeded the previous year.’’ They kept doing that – even while shifting from Rattray Street to the City Hotel building on the southeast corner of Princes Street and Moray Place, in 1983, and then, in 1986, to the present site, which they bought – until well into the 1990s. In the meantime, the store’s sales had swung from 75 per cent vinyl to 50 per cent cassette and then, from the late-1980s, to almost entirely CD. It was a busy period, as people swapped their vinyl collections for polycarbonate plastic. ‘‘When CDs first became popular, they’d be buying up to five at a time,’’ Hing’s wife Noni says. Disk Den was the first in the country to become a Top of the Pops album discount store. ‘‘We were $2 cheaper than The Warehouse,’’ Hing says. ‘‘Their Top 40 CDs were $26.95 and ours were $24.95. So, we basically captured a large proportion of the market.’’ The mid-1990s was the peak. Disk Den – a single independent music store in a city of 120,000 – had about one per cent of the country’s music market. ‘‘There was about 100 million [dollars] New Zealand, wholesale, [per year] of total music CD sales. We did just over a million dollars worth.’’ Business plateaued and, early in the new millennium, the Chins thought of retiring. Then they noticed a resurging interest in New Zealand music – especially Dunedin music – particularly from overseas visitors. ‘‘Our daughter was living in London at the time,’’ Noni says. ‘‘She rang one day and said, ‘Did you know Disk Den is in Lonely Planet [travel guide]?’ ‘‘We had wondered why all these tourists were coming in to buy New Zealand music. It was mostly Dunedin Sound bands they were interested in – The Chills, The Bats, Tall Dwarfs, 3Ds, The Verlaines…’’ The growth of music streaming platforms has changed everything. It is now ‘‘a lot quieter’’. Hing is a member of Dunedin’s Chin dynasty. Chin Fooi emigrated to New Zealand from China in the early 1900s, setting up laundries in inner-city Dunedin. His son, Eddie Chin, Hing’s father, opened various businesses including the Sunset Strip and Tai Pei cabarets, in Dunedin’s Exchange area. Eddie married in China, in 1949. Hing and his mother came to New Zealand four years later. His five younger siblings include Sam, who owned Sammy’s Cabaret, and Jones, who owns the Crown Hotel. Hing’s musical influences began early when his grandmother gave him a crystal radio set. The loudest radio station was 4XD, fostering his affection for country music, particularly Kris Kristofferson, and the music of the 1960s – ‘‘Roy Orbison, the early Rolling Stones, just about all of The Beatles’’. Hing was also the happy recipient of free concert tickets given to his father, who was too busy to attend. ‘‘So as a 13-, 14-, 15-year-old, I went to Louis Armstrong at the Town Hall here, in 1963, Marty Robbins, in ’64, and the Rolling Stones, in ’65.’’ Noni’s musical tastes are more contemporary – The Cure, The Smiths, Fat Freddy’s Drop, L.A.B. – but the couple have enjoyed many concerts together, sometimes courtesy of a grateful record company. ‘‘We go for the vibe, for the music, for everything,’’ Noni says. ‘‘Leonard Cohen was probably our favourite.’’ Noni grew up in Christchurch. She and Hing married in 1973. They had three children; Lisa, Nathan and Lawrence. Inevitably, the store and music were foundation stones in the children’s lives. ‘‘When Lisa was about two she already knew all the Neil Diamond songs,’’ Noni says. Lisa adds that she was vacuuming and serving behind the counter while still at primary school. Dunedin bands became her passion, fuelled by access to her uncle’s music venues. Her first concert was a matinee performance by Netherworld Dancing Toys. ‘‘I would go and do the coat check when I wasn’t old enough to work behind the bar. So, I got to see all of those bands. My favourites were Straitjacket Fits, The 3Ds and The Chills.’’ Hing and Noni’s children, however, had no interest in continuing the family business. ‘‘It’s a sunset industry,’’ Hing agrees. Music and commerce, divergent arts, have been deeply entwined in Hing and Noni’s lives, expressing themselves as a single entity, Disk Den. The key to running a successful music store is stocking what your customers want rather than catering to your own tastes, Hing says. ‘‘Because music is fashionable, the hardest thing is to gauge what the coming trends are.’’
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