A first pressing of Mozart rests on the front rack at Royal Music Collection, a few sleeves away from A R Rahman’s Bombay (1995). Ghazal vinyls stand beside The Doors’ self-titled record, while hip hop CDs like Nas’s Illmatic are stacked just behind them. Old Hindi film music cassettes sit in ageing plastic cases near the counter. The shop, a narrow ground floor unit at Kitab Mahal on Dr Dadabhai Naoroji Road in Fort, is packed tightly with records, CDs and tapes arranged by language and genre, all within arm’s reach. Here, music is physical, it has weight, edges, corners that press into each other.
Abdul Razak, 64, owner of Royal Music Collection, lifts the shutter at 11.30 every morning. It takes him an hour and a half to take the records out and arrange them, wiping each vinyl with a cloth, checking for scratches and placing it upright so it does not bend under weight. In the evening, it takes another hour and a half to pack them back in. Nearly three hours of his day are spent handling the music. He has followed this routine since 1979. After arranging the stacks, he sits on a small stool by the entrance. Customers come to buy, but many stay to talk.
In a time when a monthly subscription can unlock millions of songs on a phone, his shop still runs on touch, recall and conversation. “The quality is completely different,” Razak said, adding, “A real listener knows the difference.”
It started with just 50 records
In 1979, he had just 50 records. “That was it. Fifty records,” Razak said, remembering an anecdote which led to the origin of his shop. “A friend of mine had them. He told me to sell them. I said, “Okay, I’ll try.” He did not think of it as a business then. “I was just helping him. I kept the records here. People started buying. Then I bought more.” He shrugged. “Slowly, it became my business.”
Forty six years later, the shop remains the same size. The walls are dense with English and Hindi LPs, jazz, rock, blues, ghazals, Sufi, classical, Tamil, Kannada and more. When CDs replaced LPs in the 1990s, his record sales fell. “So I started selling CDs,” Razak said. When cassettes were still in demand, he stocked those too.
Today, vinyl is again his primary draw, both old pressings and newly imported records. Prices begin at Rs 850 and can rise to Rs 7,000 or more depending on rarity and pressing. A first pressing of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, he said, can cost between Rs 8,000 and Rs 9,000. A newer company release might sell for around Rs 5,000.
Razak insists vinyl offers something streaming cannot. “When you play a record, you hear everything — the depth, the warmth. Even the small scratching sound, that is part of it. It is original,” he said, adding, “Digital removes things. It is too clean. With vinyl, you feel the real sound.”
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The shop has no website and no online catalogue. Its address appears on Google Maps only because customers uploaded it. Many ask him to send photos of records, but Razak refuses. “You come to the shop and see. It is better,” he would tell them.
In recent years, college students and young music enthusiasts, many in their early twenties, have begun coming in regularly, exploring vinyl for the first time. “Now many young people, 25-26 years old, are coming. They are starting fresh collections,” he said, adding that they often arrive prepared. “Taylor Swift, Linkin Park, Pink Floyd. Rock is always the most demanded genre of music.” He paused, before adding, “Now they are even asking for trance and techno.”
Listening rooms and vinyl sessions have emerged across Mumbai. “Before, nobody was talking about vinyl,” Razak said. “Now people want that experience.” Still, he added, “This generation is budget conscious. They look for something between Rs 2,000 and Rs 3,000.”
Razak does not see streaming as a threat. “I don’t give a damn,” he said. “I know my audience. They know sound, they know quality. They come here because they want the real thing, the warmth, the depth. As long as people like that exist, this vinyl will keep spinning.”
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As evening approaches, customers continue to step into the narrow shop, some browsing, most buying. Outside, music has moved from vinyl to cassette to CD to invisible streams in the air. Formats have shifted over the decades. The shop has not. For Razak, each sale loops back to 1979, when fifty records were enough to begin with. Nearly five decades on, the ritual remains unchanged: unpack, arrange, discuss, pack again. At the Royal Music Collection, the needle drops every morning, and the music keeps spinning, refusing to yield to time.
