San Antonio, TX | Local business owners say Small Business Saturday more important than ever before: Between Black Friday and Cyber Monday lies the sometimes forgotten Small Business Saturday. Local business owners said it’s more important then ever, as local businesses compete with big online retailers in order to remain open. Adrian Heart has worked at Hog Wild Records for eight years. The record store off North Main Street has been open since 1982. Heart said he believes customers keep coming back, even while the shop competes with the giant online world, because of the experience. “The experience of finding a record they have never heard before,” Heart said. “Looking for different music and they know they have a rapport with us.” It’s not just local brick-and-mortars that are fighting to stay open, but businesses that sell their homegrown products the old fashioned way— from stands at the Pearl Farmers Market.
Andover, UK | New vintage vinyl store The Record Box opens its doors in Andover: The Record Box, in George Yard, holds a host of vinyls [“Vinyls,” not a word. —Ed.] and collectables and opened its doors to the public for the first time on Saturday. Phil, who was inspired to open the store, said: “I’ve been doing it for years, about 35 years, collecting everything and anything. Captain Scarlet stuff mainly, that’s my main thing. I do collect records as well, my main genre is punk. This is my own personal collection and obviously stuff I’ve bought over the years and duplicates and stuff like that.” To start with the store will be opening on Saturdays only, from 10am to 5pm. Phil believes there is a big market for vinyl, as sales have increased in recent years. He added: “Andover needs something like this. “I think there’s a market for it, a big market for it…”
Baltimore, MD | Farewell to Record and Tape Traders, a suburban refuge for musical discovery: If nothing else, record stores are beautiful. They have a certain unplanned allure, stacks tilting under their own weight, row after row of colors and words loosely organized by genre and alphanumeric value. Recently, Record and Tape Traders in Towson, the flagship of a once-robust local chain, announced it will be gone after a 40-year run—from 1978-2018. The singularity of the Towson Record and Tape Traders was in part its location, which was kind of a weird spot–behind an up-market grocery store in a somewhat pointless strip mall off of Dulaney Valley Road. Those things—strip and mall and Dulaney Valley Road—don’t exactly scream “formative.” Compared to essential music shops like Amoeba Music in Los Angeles or even Sound Garden in Fells Point, a record store in suburban Baltimore County seems insignificant. But that seclusion and obscurity gave it a unique value: It was a refuge for the weird…
Midland, MI | Radio Wasteland moves its groove: Jim Gleason has spent the last three days moving vinyl records — some 4,000 to 5,000 of them — box by box, crate by crate. Luckily for Gleason, who owns Radio Wasteland Records in Midland, he has only a few steps to go for the transfer. He’s moving his business next door to 716 George St….”We’ll be able to put more records out,” Gleason said of the larger space. “But more importantly, we’ll be able to better display some of our stock. For example, our limited space means that we’ve had to leave the country music LPs in boxes on the floor. We’re also hoping to expand our classical and jazz music selections with the added space.” Moving into 718 George St., the space where Radio Wasteland occupied for about two years, is Stolloween, owned by Scott Stoll, an award-winning papier mâché artist who specializes in Halloween-related subject matter. Gleason, who owns the business with his daughter Katie, said he has about 8,000 more records in storage that he’ll bring over to the new location, which is double the size of the old.
PEI, CA | New Vinyl Pressing Plant Open For Business…In PEI. Last year, Charlottetown entrepreneur Ghislaine Cormier and partner Gideon Banahene won $10,000 at the annual Dragon’s Contest in PEI’s capital city, and it helped fund Atlantic Canada’s first vinyl record plant that is now open for business. Kaneshii Vinyl Press in PEI teamed up with Toronto’s Viryl Technologies to open a wholly automated vinyl pressing plant that runs on cloud-based software that can press 180 records an hour. The plant is set up to stamp 7, 10- and 12-inch discs in a variety of colours. Already, the company has received orders from the US, New Zealand, Australia, Finland and, of course, Canada. Jeff Brownlee at PLANT has the story, and Desiree Anstey at Journal Pioneer has the backstory.
Auckland, NZ | Holiday Records Is Bringing Vinyl Pressing Back To NZ After 30 Years: Two enterprising Aucklanders are about to open New Zealand’s first record press in more than 30 years. Music fans are in for a whole new way of browsing for their favourite album, in a boutique record store in the central city where they can also watch the latest band’s album being placed on vinyl. Holiday Records will open its flagship retail space next week in Wellesley St and start record production in February next year. The business had its beginnings two years ago when Ben Wallace went to find a vinyl press locally for his own band but came up short. The closure of the country’s only pressing plant (EMI) in 1987 had resulted in artists having to send their tapes overseas to be pressed at a higher cost and with a time delay. “I was gutted,” says Ben. “It was assumed that it could be done here. I’ve had mates’ bands trying to press vinyl overseas and still haven’t got it back six months later. As a New Zealand artist, you’re often at the bottom of the pile.”
80,000 records and counting: meet the owner of Australia’s largest vinyl collection: A few months ago an article on ABC broke the news that Ken Perkins, owner of the largest known record collection in Australia, had sadly passed away. The 80,000-strong archive had taken Perkins half a century to build up – which levels out to more than four records per day. It was a collection like very few in the world, and Perkins’ family knew they had to find the right person to pass it along to. Gunjo Discopantz aka DJ Gonz, who has worked in and out of record stores forever and DJs every Saturday night at the Bank Hotel in Newtown, is the one who now owns that collection. After we tracked him down, we had to have a chat.
