Album covers to form exhibit at Columbus Museum of Art: Long before digitized music, when album-cover artwork wasn’t scaled down to fit the tiny screen of a handheld gadget, the tactile and visual elements of a vinyl record held a distinct appeal. The covers had a certain sight, feel, even smell. An exhibit at the Columbus Museum of Art will revisit this corner of the past at a time when the vintage audio format is again enjoying heavy rotation among old- and new-school listeners alike.
Music aficionados say loss of Jazz record store: ‘A lost art’: All day Saturday, the world-famous Jazz Record Mart filled with customers for what could be the store’s last weekend. People who’ve been visiting the downtown shop for decades browsed vinyl records and CDs. A man visiting from Australia stopped in. One woman even biked down in frigid weather from the city’s Northwest Side to buy tapes before the store closes…Koester, 83, said he expects to sell his inventory Monday to an out-of-state buyer and shut the store down. High rent, Koester said, has caused him to sell “The World’s Largest Jazz and Blues Record Store.”
Visiting America’s greatest independent record stores: A future in which music jumps off the streaming service and onto the turntable, where warm, somehow better notes float out with that real, visceral feeling. These vendors of disc-shaped nostalgia have become beloved local spots and legendary stop-ins in their own right, and to put together a list of them is to unfairly define the elusive and ever-changing “music scene” of America’s great cities and small towns. But fuck it, we did it anyway.
Concord sets up vinyl record shop in Malibu: US independent music company Concord Bicycle Music has opened a specialty retail shop devoted to vinyl records at the Malibu Country Mart in Malibu, California. Stax of Wax offers a limited but selected catalogue of over 900 titles ranging from new releases, classic reissues and box sets in a wide array of genres, including rock, jazz, soul, funk, hip-hop, electronica, blues, country, Americana and indie/alternative.
Handmade wooden display for your records: We have top-notch equipment to play our vinyl on, but what about to store it? There are far less options, yes? Montreal, Canada-based furniture designer/maker Kai Takeshima has designed the handmade Record Display I that not only holds and stores your records, it displays them too. Made of walnut and brass, the unit holds approximately 290 records total with each section being 9″ deep by 13″ wide. The open leg base helps reduce the visual heaviness of the storage piece.
Audio cassettes, vinyl singles rise from music-industry grave: Two years ago, something unexpected happened: Musical artists and record labels ramped up their requests for cassette tape in a major way. Today, National Audio’s business is booming; it is manufacturing 250 to 350 titles at a time — a 33 percent increase from 2014 — and working on five to 10 releases a week for major record-label conglomerate Universal Music Group.
