Mark your calendars if you haven’t already: Tomorrow, Saturday April 18, is Record Store Day.The holiday started a couple years back as a way to honor America’srapidly vanishing independent music retailers, a noble cause if I’veever heard one. Now it’s grown to the point where all sorts of artistsbig and small are playing intimate in-stores and offering exclusive products atparticipating indie shops across the U.S. A very abridged list of some of the most notable Record Store Day specials is after the jump, but there are zillions of these things happening. Click over to the official site for much more complete info on releases and in-stores,plus the all-important list of participating vendors. Then let us knowin the comments section how you’ll be stimulating the moribundmusic-retail economy this weekend!
Exclusive releases:
- Bruce Springsteen, "What Love Can Do"/"A Night With the New Jersey Devil" 7" vinyl single
- Bob Dylan, "Dreamin’ of You"/"Down Along the Cove" 7" vinyl single
- Crosby, Stills, and Nash, live double vinyl album
- The Smiths, "The Headmaster Ritual"/"Oscillate Wildly" 7" vinyl single
- New Order, "Temptation"/"Hurt" 7" vinyl single
- Tom Waits, "Lucinda/Ain’t Goin’ Down to the Well"/"Bottom of the World" 7" vinyl single (live recordings from 2008’s Glitter & Doom tour)
- Grizzly Bear, "While You Wait For The Others"/"He Hit Me" (live on KCRW) 7" vinyl single
- Sonic Youth/Beck, split 7" vinyl EP
- Flight of the Conchords, "Pencils in the Wind" 7" vinyl single
- Vetiver, "Wishing Well" 7" vinyl single
- Blitzen Trapper, "War Is Placebo" 7" vinyl single
- Iron &Wine, Norfolk 6-20-05 live CD
- Wilco, bonus downloadable concert for anyone who purchases Ashes of American Flags DVD
- Jane’s Addiction, "Mountain Song" 7" vinyl single
- Cold War Kids, live EP
- The Dandy Warhols, Earth to the Remix EP, Volume Two
- Cursive/Ladyfinger (ne), split 10" picture disc EP
In-store shows:
- The Cannabinoids featuring Erykah Badu, Dallas, Tex.’s Good Records
- The Breeders, Cincinnati, Ohio’s Shake It Records
- Eagles of Death Metal, Claremont, Calif.’s Rhino Records
- Chris Cornell, Minneapolis, Minn.’s Electric Fetus
- Talib Kweli, New York, N.Y.’s Fat Beats
- Mark Olson & Gary Louris, Austin, Tex.’s Waterloo Records
- Prefuse 73/The Pains of Being Pure at Heart/Bill Callahan, New York, N.Y.’s Other Music
- Ra Ra Riot, East Lansing, Mich.’s Flat Black and Circular (acoustic performance)
- Silversun Pickups, Berkeley, Calif.’s Rasputin Music and DVDs
- The Bird and the Bee, L.A.’s Fingerprints
- DM Stith, Bloomington, Ind.’s Landlocked Music
- Uncle Murda, Brooklyn, N.Y.’s Basement Mix Records
And much, much more…
Comments (1-12) of 12 Add your comment
This is awesome, and very cool of EW to promote record store day. I’ve trying to spread the word about all week long myself.
http://theninthdragonking.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/record-store-day-april-18/
This is very cool. I love and miss record stores. Nice post!
Please don’t flame me, guys, but could someone out there please explain the continuing appeal of vinyl? I know, supposedly it sounds warmer than a CD, but it also sounds scratchier, and every time you play a record, you damage it, if only a little. Is it the novelty of vinyl that’s so appealing? The nostalgia? Seriously, I’m asking. Could someone, in a calm, rational and hopefully friendly tone, explain what’s so great about vinyl? I’m not trying to pick a fight. I really just don’t understand it.
Thank you EW for running this article!
Record stores and CD stores are vanishing like pizzas at a teen party. We really need to support them and keep that part of our culture surviving.
If they really want this to work and bring people into record stores, these have to be giveaways, not limited edition records to buy. That’s what the comic book industry does for free comic book day and they get a lot of foot traffic into the stores.
Great to see Vinyl still out there. Still the best quality.
http://tvdonewright.com/2009/04/17/strike-averted-sag-and-producers-reach-a-deal/
This is a calm, rational, considered reply to “crabby old man”. Until recently I was an avid CD fan. I had not owned records for 21 years. But over time I’ve found my respect for CD’s has diminished. No one listens to music on decent sound systems anymore, and on a computer a CD sounds very similar to a high quality mp3 file. And that is why CD stores are dying by the second, their is no perceived advantage to owning the CD as opposed to downloading the album.
I got into vinyl because I had gaps in my digital collection with unavailable product. I’m talking about stuff you couldn’t even download from a peer-to-peer site. And, once I started adding a few vinyl albums, I got hooked. There is the artwork, which is a lot more adventurous than typical CD fare. There’s the fact you really have to listen to a whole side at a time. And just caring for the records seem to add a luster, an extra value to the music it contains.
After 25-30 years, I’m really amazed how good this vinyl sounds.
I had worked in music retailing for fifteen years, and I knew I’d lose my job, but I did it for the avid retail consumers. The “true” music maniacs are still out there, God bless ‘em, but I worked near the University of Minnesota campus, and file sharing and “burning” of cd’s killed this business for good. It’s over, it’s done for, stick the fork in it…
People quit believing in the system, and that system didn’t help. Once the internet took over, it was ALL over. I can recall nights of opening at Midnight on a Monday to sell a new release and having a dozen to a hundred fans waiting. Then it went to “I hope we get a dozen”.
Technology has killed all nuance of the record store. As of now, there will be kids who never know such a place ever existed, and that’s just f+cking sad!
Maybe part of the appeal of vinyl is nostalgia, but a lot of care went into putting together albums, and if you have decent equiment and take care, a record will last longer than a tape or even some CD’s. I’m not entirely sure how to explain it, there’s just somthing about vinyl that can’t be reproduced with CD’s or the best of digital formats. Certain audiophiles may claim that records sound better, but that’s debatable and dependent upon your equipment and your setup. Vinyl hasn’t completely died and some bands/labels continue to support it, even if as limited editions. The 8 Track is long gone, I haven’t seen a new release on cassette for quite some time and CD’s are declining and the MiniDisc didn’t have much of an impact. But somehow, the record still has some life in it.
Get over it people. It’s called change. You want to bring the horse and buggy back too?
Not everything needs to change and vinyl never completely went away. Some labels continued to press albums and will continue to do so.
But Record Store Day shouldn’t be just about the vinyl.
@Crabby: mp3 is lossy by design, that’s how it gets the small filesize; as a result, the less-noticable nuances in the music are gone forever when the music is converted to mp3.
CDs are recorded at a 44.1 KHz sample-rate. At the Nyquist point of that, 22.05 KHz, the only waveform that’s stored correctly is a squarewave, and then only when it’s in sync with the sample-clock; tones just below that in frequency are skewed or distorted. The anti-aliasing filters used in CD players mask off that and nearby high frequencies to filter out other-sideband noise, skewing what they don’t mask off entirely. Young people can hear those frequencies. Older people like us can’t, but can hear how it affects lower-frequency waveforms, like a phase-shifter stomp-box affects a guitar’s harmonic output. Vinyl recordings have their own problems, but they preserve nuances which CDs don’t. Phillips developed the ‘Compact-CD’ format to be “good enough”, a doable compromise, and it is but it’s not perfect.