A good sort of spin: Record Store Day returns as young fans sustain old tech
Vinyl LPs are inconvenient, fragile, and exist outside the algorithms. Somehow their vintage charm keeps enticing young music fans to flock to our beloved independent record stores.
Last weekend’s $163 million domestic box office for “A Minecraft Movie” starring Jack Black and former Iowan Jason Momoa was the biggest film opening of the year.
It took the best-selling video game of all time—also arguably the most wildly creative digital gaming universe—to convince younger viewers to peel themselves off their sofas and away from their Netflix subscriptions to revisit theaters. A whopping 78% of the Minecraft moviegoing masses were age 24 or younger according to research service PostTrak.
The video game Minecraft didn’t hit the market in its final form until 2011. A 21st century phenomenon is helping to sustain an American tradition of movie houses dating back to 1896.
Now let’s turn our attention to the coming weekend and another celebration of the recorded arts in the public square: Record Store Day (RSD) on Saturday, April 12. RSD was established in 2008 and has steadily grown despite the onset of smartphones and the streaming economy. Hundreds of LP titles exclusive to RSD now are released each year, inspiring collectors to line up or even camp out in front of record retailers. Here’s yet another quaint technology from the 19th century—the brainchild of Thomas Edison and other inventors—that remains remarkably vital in the modern day.
By some measures, almost half of consumers who shop at independent retailers on Record Store Day are under age 35.
I don’t know about you, but I find it more than a little reassuring that, no matter how much Silicon Valley gives us reasons to retreat to separate corners and stare at our screens, humans still manage to gather in public and celebrate shared interests.
We’re social creatures deeply moved by grand art, and that will never be fully obscured no matter how bleak things get.
Video: In honor of Record Store Day I recommend five LPs.
Independent record stores have been a consistent thread throughout my life:
I grew up standing in line for concert tickets at Homer’s Music in the Old Market in downtown Omaha. I still miss the music store in the basement of the Antiquarium that used to exist just a block north.
I remember buying the Who album “Face Dances” at now-defunct Orpheus Records in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., while attending a 4-H leadership conference. It was the first of many times I’ve regretted carrying LPs on a flight.
I visited the HMV (His Master’s Voice) music store on Oxford Street in London in the early ‘90s when CDs already had taken over the marketplace.
I fondly remember bygone Des Moines retailers such as Music Circuit, Peeples, and Archives.
I loved working a part-time gig at the CD Shoppe in Urbandale while finding my footing in the daily news industry.
I wandered the floors of the labyrinthian Tower Records in downtown Chicago.
While attending the South By Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, I caught midday performances by bands in the aisles of Waterloo Records.
Jack White’s Third Man Records in Nashville, appropriately enough, may be the quirkiest record store I’ve ever visited.
Electric Fetus—more than half a century old—is a regular stop whenever I’m visiting family in Minneapolis.
An epicenter of grunge rock history, Easy Street Records in Seattle incorporates a full-fledged café.
I had to buzz up to the eighth floor of a building in the Chelsea neighborhood in New York to gain access to Fred Cohen’s Jazz Record Center, an institution since 1983.
I have such affection for these shared spaces (dare I say “sanctuaries”?) where music fans raid the bins in search of a gem that’s far beyond the clinical programming of any digital algorithm to recommend.
Des Moines has our own healthy share of record stores I encourage you to support, including Rogue Planet Music, Vinyl Cup, Ratt’s Underground Records, Skylabs Audio, Marv’s Music, and Jay’s CD & Hobby.
But the shop I’ve probably visited the most is 25-year-old institution Zzz Records. It began downtown (inside the Masonic Temple, then the East Village) but now is situated on Ingersoll Avenue.
Owner Nate Niceswanger invested his future in vinyl LPs before RSD, before it was cool, and long before the price of a Taylor Swift LP was pushing $40.
“It's almost like a family reunion,” Niceswanger said of his favorite thing about RSD. “Once we get through the initial crowd in the morning, it's much more laid back in the afternoon. We tend to see a lot of old faces that might not come in as often anymore, so I end up spending a lot of the day just catching up with folks. It's also fun to see customers who are hitting several stores on the same day. There's just a certain energy all day long that can't be matched at any other point in the year.”
But he pays for his heartfelt family reunion with all the grueling preparation the week before RSD.
Niceswanger says vinyl sales have increased steadily throughout his store’s generation of service—although the post-COVID spike in new vinyl may be waning in the face of inflation. More fans may be opting for used records. Online LP collector hub Discogs even issued a report last month highlighting a 24% surge in record prices in just the last five years.
Meanwhile, CDs seem to be staging a comeback of their own, rising from 5-8% of Zzz’s revenue to 20% today.
Jack Black is sort of a constant character through all of this. Twenty-five years ago, just before Niceswanger opened Zzz, Black starred in the movie “High Fidelity” alongside John Cusack. Based on the novel by Englishman Nick Hornby, the movie adaptation is set in an independent record store in Chicago. At one point, Black refuses to sell a customer a copy of the Stevie Wonder pop ballad “I Just Called to Say I Love You.”
“It's sentimental tacky crap,” Black says. “Do we look like the kind of store that sells ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You?’ Go to the mall.”
I doubt you’ll receive that snobbery at any store you visit on RSD, especially in Des Moines.
Keep spinning, my fellow vinyl addicts.
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