Reports: Traffic, Sales Up At 2009 Record Store Day

Found a couple of great articles, one on the success of Record Store Day 2, and the other about the obsession of vinyl. Enjoy the articles:

Traffic, Sales Up At 2009 Record Store Day

By Ed Christman, N.Y.

Thanks to the 82 exclusive releases and limited availability, customers lined up at record stores all around the country on Saturday morning and helped kickoff Record Store Day 2009 with a bang. Reports suggest traffic pick-ups and sales volume this year will be more than last year's inaugural event.

"It was my best day by far," says Eric Levin, owner of Criminal Records in Atlanta and the head of the Assn. of Independent Media Stores coalition. "We had 600 people in the store; it was well-controlled chaos. My vinyl sales alone yesterday was larger than last year's total Record Store Day take."

Michael Kurtz, executive director of the Music Monitor Network, tells Billboard that from the stores that he heard from, "the majority of the stores had matched last year's volume by mid-afternoon."

He added that stores, who have been already selling increasing amounts of vinyl to both the old and younger demos, were particularly shocked by "the massive amount of young people coming into stores looking for vinyl." The exclusives and other commercial releases timed for Record Store Day, really add the extra sizzle, store executives tell Billboard. "All these little gems that the labels created for us - what an incredible effort from the small labels to the big guys, it was really stunning," Criminal Records Levin says.

Read the rest of the article here:

billboard.biz

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Vinyl Lives

An Introduction To The Obsession Of Record Collecting

By Bob Lange


In 1977, at age 6, I bought my first record, Kiss Alive, and that started an obsession that, for better or worse, has taken a big chunk of both my time and money over the years. When I really started buying albums by bands other than Kiss, in the early 80s usually courtesy of Columbia House, it was always vinyl, even as my peers were buying cassettes to play in their boomboxes. The way I looked at it, I could tape the record, but I couldn't make a record of the cassette. From that point forward, vinyl was the way to go.

Now, at 38, I have a collection, modest by some standards and huge by others, that includes well over 4000 records (over twice as many titles as I have on the vastly inferior CD format). I spend a lot of time down in the basement listening to them, going through them, looking at the cover art. My kids, at only five and two years old, already know how to properly handle them. After all, the records will theirs one day if they play their cards right. The bottom line is that, while it may seem pathetic or immature to a lot of people, those records are a big part of my life.

Read the rest here:

glidemagazine.com