In rotation: 2/13/18

Selectadisc legacy honoured by DJs at bakery: DJs and music traders are taking over a bakery to honour a much-loved record store which once stood there. Selectadisc, which closed its doors in Nottingham in 2009, was described as the “John Peel of record shops” and traded for more than 40 years. Its former sister store in London featured on the sleeve of Oasis album, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? A six-hour celebration was taking place in the shop’s former premises in Market Street…The record shop found fame when its sister branch in Berwick Street, London, was featured on the cover of the 1995’s (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?

Vinyl revival: Truck Store record shop celebrates seventh birthday with music and cake: The last surviving independent music shop in Oxford has proved its pluckiness as it celebrated its seventh year in the city. The city was once awash with record racks boasting national and local musical acts. Now Truck store stands alone in Cowley Road – with the only other music retailer being newcomer Fopp, in Gloucester Green. Truck Store’s fortunes have been helped by the revival of interest in vinyl records. To help it mark its seventh birthday over the weekend, the store invited local artists to celebrate its success…Truck Store manager Carl Smithson, who has been with the shop since it opened in 2011, said: “We had a lot of people in the shop and it was very busy for all the acts.

Record stores are small havens for local collectors: There are only a trio of shops on the South Shore that still sell vinyl records, but for local music lovers those stores are a place to feel at home. When John Nichols and Bobby DePesa were first toying with the idea of opening a record store in the basement of their Norwell skateboard shop, they had a few boxes of unwanted vinyl records lying around waiting to be tossed out. It wasn’t until a 16-year-old girl begged them to buy a seemingly random record containing the speeches of John F. Kennedy that a light bulb lit up. “That’s when we knew,” Nichols said. “I never saw that coming, and I would have said ‘See you later’ to that record, but everything will sell to someone.”

Vinyl fans dig for treasure at KUSF record swap: Aimee Myers said she was on a mission for Iggy Pop and the Cramps as she flipped through crate after crate of vinyl records on Sunday. And a few hours into digging at the Rock ’n’ Swap record fair at University of San Francisco’s McLaren Hall, she hit pay dirt: a $25 used copy of “Raw Power” by Iggy and the Stooges. “I’m really excited,” the 21-year-old media studies major said, clutching an older copy of the seminal 1973 pre-punk masterpiece in both arms. “I’ve been looking for this for a while, and I’ve been buying vinyl since the fifth grade.” Myers, a junior at USF, continued her hunt among the hundreds of record buyers and vendors packed into the conference center for the four-times-per-year swap meet that draws people from all over the Bay Area and state.

Music lovers listen up! Record sale coming to Spokane Valley: The Spokane Valley Event Center will be filled with music and movie lovers alike, beginning at 9am on Saturday, February 24 and continuing on Sunday, February 25, for the highly anticipated Spokane Public Radio Record Sale. Hardcore collectors and curiosity seekers get in line early to get top picks from their favorite musician, music genre, or hard-to-find items. Inside, it’s a collector’s dream come true. From Beethoven to the Beatles, U2 to Motown favorites, you’ll find albums from a wide cross-section of musical genres, including classical, rock, R & B, soul, reggae, folk, country, world music, children’s music, soundtracks, and jazz.

The CD is dead? Not so fast. …people who had shopped at Best Buy in recent years weren’t exactly surprised at the move. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the CD section (and selection) in stores has been shrinking for years. This mirrors industry statistics. According to Billboard’s deep dive into Nielsen’s 2017 Year-End Music Report, there were 88.2 million CDs sold last year, a decrease of 20 percent from 2016. And although vinyl remained popular — sales rose nine percent, to 14.3 million — streaming dominated the year. On-demand audio and video streams increased a whopping 43 percent, to 618 billion. Total physical and digital album sales, meanwhile, decreased 17.7 percent, to 169.15 million.

Could rising prices kill the vinyl boom? The breaking point, for me, was $64.98 for the new Queens of the Stone Age album…Even $35 as a “cheaper” vinyl alternative would have seemed obscene just a few years ago. But as anyone who’s been buying or selling vinyl through the medium’s much-documented commercial resurgence in the music market over the past few years is aware, $30 and up is increasingly the new normal for new LPs — at a time when new record shops are sprouting everywhere, vinyl plants are opening again for the first time since the CD drove the format to the brink of extinction during the 1990s, and more efficient presses are being developed for the first time in 30 years and sales of LPs have surged for more than a decade from a low point of less than one million units in the U.S. in 2005 to 14.3 million pieces in the States last year.

Why is the price of vinyl albums at a record high? Music on vinyl has been coming back for years, and production is ramping up at a Burlington plant. So why are the prices getting so crazy? Even $35 as a “cheaper” vinyl alternative would have seemed obscene just a few years ago. But as anyone who’s been buying or selling vinyl over the past few years is aware, $30 and up is increasingly the new normal for new LPs — at a time when new record shops are sprouting everywhere, vinyl plants are opening again for the first time since the CD drove the format to the brink of extinction during the 1990s, newer and more efficient presses are being developed for the first time in 30 years and sales of LPs have surged from a low point of less than one million units in the U.S. in 2005 to 14.3 million pieces in the States last year.

Disappearing act: As the vinyl industry resurges, used records are vanishing under the weight of new reprints: …When vinyl’s comeback resulted in a trendy display case of modern and retro (but all newly minted) records for sale at the Urban Outfitters around the corner from my apartment, I scoffed at the idea of paying $35 for Pink Floyd’s The Wall, because I had bought the same record — though a second-edition (1979) release — at Rasputin Music for $3.95. I made the same face every time I was faced with the overpriced entries at Barnes & Noble. I could depend on my local, independent record stores to be a place I could purchase secondhand vinyl — it’s how I built a sizable collection of Queen albums, of Pink Floyd, of The Clash and Led Zeppelin — almost never for more than $10 a record.

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  • SUPPORTING YOUR LOCAL INDIE SHOPS SINCE 2007


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