This is the 21st year B Sharp Records has been open.
The yellow funk lab on Rundle Street is somewhat of an institution for music heads here and abroad. We caught up with one of the three owners, Todd Eason for a chat about running a record store in the MP3 era and why they keep digging up the best beats.

What’s the deal? We truly believe in everything that we sell otherwise what’s the point? All other stores, more-or-less, get delegated by distributors what to buy whereas we’re totally independent.

And what sort of music do you guys get passionate about in here?
Well Sam (Langley, the other owner of B#) was in Crisp back in the day and that was quite successful at a young age, and before that he was is in the roots of the culture of Hip Hop here. My background is that my family has the oldest existing jazz band in the city – Eddie White’s All Stars. My uncle actually played trumpet for Ray Charles, so I’ve got that jazz background. But I guess through making your own decisions you find your own sound.

How do you source your records?
We just sit there and listen. Yeah… that’s the best way. Most of our distributors are overseas and we do a lot of time where we just sit down and listen. We can’t do too much in the shop because you’ve got to serve customers and all that kind of stuff. So a lot of the real work is done outside of the shop. It’s not unusual for me to sit and listen for 3-5 hours in one night…just hundreds of songs to work out what we want. We listen through our distributors online and also a lot of reference points… find a song that you like and then you find that label. It’s a good tip for someone getting into music. You find someone generic, then you find out what label they’re on and then you follow that label and find all this new music and you tree out from that.

What about the MP3 revolution? What has that done to shops like B#?
For the “download DJs”, so to speak, there’s no respect at all. It’s actually a window that’s kind of turning around. It’s a two year turnaround where we’re seeing a lot of people coming back to the sound of records. A). Because you’ve got that artistry and the proof that they’ve got it. B) It sounds better. I mean why do studios spend millions of dollars on their equipment? They don’t spend millions of dollars to compress their sound, do they?