IT’S fantastic to hear Oxford is getting its very own independent record store again (Oxford Mail, January 6), especially since the current vinyl explosion.

A branch of Witney’s Rapture music store will move into a former video store in Cowley Road, thus raising Oxford’s music shop credentials.

The Oxfam shop in Broad Street caters for vinyl-spinning aficionados with a sundry selection, but with a new shop in East Oxford, music fans will have a broader choice.

Internet sales account for a big percentage of the aforementioned vinyl resurgence, as well as BBC 6 Music’s vinyl persuasion, and there is still nothing quite like leafing through a stack of records in a specialist shop hoping to find a long lost gem.

Oxford’s musical history offers a cornucopia of local artists, including Supergrass, Radiohead and even a concert visit by the Fab Four (pre-Beatlemania) at the Carfax Assembly Rooms in 1963.

Also Mike Oldfield of Tubular Bells fame once recorded at the now defunct Manor Studios in Shipton-on-Cherwell, (formerly owned by Richard Branson as a recording studio for Virgin Records). The ‘Modfather’ Paul Weller also recorded albums there before its unfortunate closure.

Nevertheless, Oxford’s musical reputation continues to grow, and rocketing vinyl sales prove that it’s a classic format destined to stick around, even in today’s download culture.

Oxford’s HMV has dropped the ball not stocking local bands’ vinyl releases, besides new vinyl releases by other music legends.

The result: music fans will look elsewhere. Oxford has a vibrant music scene and now, at long last, an appropriate hub in Cowley Road – Bravo to Rapture and long may they be successful.

DAVID TINSON, Moorland Road, Witney