Counter to catalogue: how record shops became record labels

Jamaican-Chinese retailer and producer who ran the counter at Aquarius Records in Half Way Tree from 1969, having earlier kept the One Stop shop at 125 King Street; his forward-thinking Aquarius productions and instrumentals (later compiled as 'Aquarius Rock') shaped early-1970s reggae, and he is credited with giving Augustus Pablo his stage name.

Downtown Kingston record shop opened by producer Winston Riley around 1971 at Chancery Lane, off North Parade, doubling as the retail front and A&R base for his Techniques label; Riley ran it until his death in 2012 and dreamed of turning it into a museum.

The London label that began as a record shop in Shepherd's Bush in the mid-1970s and became one of the two or three most important reggae catalogues outside Jamaica. It carried roots through the late 1970s, was central to the dancehall boom of the 1980s, and its Ragga Ragga Ragga compilations were how much of the world heard each year's rhythms. VP acquired it in 2008.

The Chin family label and distributor, grown out of Randy's Record Mart on North Parade in Kingston and rebuilt in Queens, New York after the family emigrated in the late 1970s. VP became the largest independent reggae and dancehall operation in the world, and for decades the primary route by which Jamaican records reached an international audience — its Strictly the Best compilations functioning as a running record of what the dance was playing.

The three are constantly confused because in Jamaica they were usually the same people. A shop sold records, a label issued them and an imprint was often just a different name on the same label for a different kind of record — a way of keeping a producer's roots output separate from their dancehall output. Attributing a record correctly means knowing which of the three a name refers to.

In Jamaica the shop counter did the job a label's A&R department does elsewhere. Shopkeepers heard what people asked for, what sold out and what stayed on the shelf, and many of them started producing on the strength of it — Randy's, Aquarius and Rockers all worked this way. The distance between knowing what the public wanted and making it was one room.

Jamaican singer, producer and retailer who rose with the Jiving Juniors in the late 1950s, founded the Crystal label, and turned his One Stop record shop into a Kingston institution — one of the clearest examples of the artist-producer-shopkeeper triple role in Jamaican music.

The record shop Vincent "Randy" Chin and his wife Patricia opened in 1958, selling used jukebox 45s from a small shop on the corner of East Street and Tower Street in downtown Kingston and named after Randy's Records of Gallatin, Tennessee. It moved to North Parade around 1960 and in 1962 into a former ice-cream parlour at 16-17 North Parade, where it became one of Jamaica's leading retail outlets and, with the studio the Chins built above it, the commercial and creative centre of the North Parade record district. The Chins left for New York in 1977 and opened VP Records — Vincent and Patricia — in Queens; the 17 North Parade name survives as VP's reissue imprint.

The West Ealing record shop opened by Chris Cracknell and Chris Sedgwick in November 1975 that grew into the Greensleeves label; moving to 44 Uxbridge Road, Shepherd's Bush in 1977, it turned counter demand for Jamaican imports into one of reggae and dancehall's most important catalogues.

How Jamaica's one-producer labels, London's licensing houses and a family firm in Queens joined into a single map of the music business.

How Kingston's record shops, and their heirs in London and New York, worked as A&R desk, bank, distributor and meeting point for Jamaican music.

In Jamaica's foundation years the man who paid for the session owned the sound - and often the shop, the studio and the label too.

A few downtown blocks pressed, sold and clashed the whole music into being.