Making Vinyl, the first B2B conference dedicated to the rebirth of the global vinyl manufacturing business is coming to Detroit November 6–7, 2017 at the Cadillac Book Westin.

The entire vinyl production chain—including representatives of the world’s leading pressing manufacturers, equipment suppliers, record labels, packagers, and stereo makers—will compare notes on this astounding industry comeback. Presented by Colonial Purchasing Co-op LLC, Record Store Day, and hometown sponsor Third Man Pressing. The Vinyl District is the official Media Partner for Making Vinyl.

You have less than one month to enter the Alex Awards, a vinyl packaging competition named in honor of Alex Steinweiss, the creator of the first album cover for Columbia Records in 1939.

The art adorning the 12” x 12” canvas of an LP symbolizes everything of value in the format’s stature as an art form in its own right which has often been lost in the digital age. It is now cherished with the record industry’s rebirth.

In 1939, 23-year-old Alex Steinweiss convinced his bosses at Columbia Records to ditch the burlap-covered “tombstone” portfolios that contained the fragile shellac 78s and replace them with an original design. Sales jumped a whopping 892%. Mr. Steinweiss designed more than 1,000 covers. As Columbia’s first art director, he also invented for the label in 1947 a paperboard jacket that is still in use today.

In 2003, the “Alex Awards” was launched to pay tribute to his accomplishments and the best of contemporary entertainment packaging. Then 86, Mr. Steinweiss accepted a lifetime achievement award at the inaugural gala in Los Angeles; he died in 2011. The awards, on hiatus since 2006, return at the Making Vinyl conference in Detroit on November 6, 2017.

Read More »

“I first got into vinyl at the age of 14.”

“Melbourne’s largest vinyl store Vinyl Solution lay just around the corner from my family home, so every weekend I’d take my bike and purchase a second-hand vinyl or two. I had a really lovely next door neighbor who introduced me to bands like Mahavishnu Orchestra, Can, and David Axlerod around that time, so I’d always be crate digging with them in mind.

Around the age of 19 I got heavily in to sampling old records because of my obsession with artists like Madlib, J Dilla, and The Avalanches. I always enjoyed asking Glen at Vinyl Solution about these old records that I’d never heard of and testing them out to see if there was anything I could sample. Artists like The Mamas & the Papas, Dave Brubek, and Joe Pass.

Read More »

Friends, Romans, Vinyl District readers; I come to praise Helen Reddy, not to bury her in the insulting verbiage many use to unfairly deride her formidable talents. Many have nothing but snide things to say about her, but I do not count myself amongst them; her multitude of AM radio hits—they didn’t call Reddy the “Queen of ‘70s Pop” for nothing—brought me too much happiness in my youth, from the altogether uncanny “Angie Baby” to her landmark feminist anthem “I Am Woman.”

Australia’s Helen Maxine Lamond Reddy has been unfairly consigned to the easy-listening dustbin of history. There’s no denying Reddy generally stuck to the middle of the road. But to steal a phrase from Dylan Thomas, she sang in her chains like the sea. And a careful look at her discography reveals she brought a host of weirdly subversive bunch of songs to the party while she was at it. Lucky for us, they’re all to be found on 1990’s Helen Reddy’s Greatest Hits (And More).

Why buy this comp and not another? I’m glad you asked. First, it includes the funky electric piano-dominated version of “Angie Baby” I grew up listening to on the radio, and not the alternative version to be found on her other best of packages. Second, it includes the dance-floor friendly “I Can’t Hear You No More,” which you won’t find on most of her greatest hits albums. And the same goes for “Happy Girls,” her moving lament to “the lonely girls of the world.”

“Happy Girls” joins a triumvirate of empathetic portraits of woman who are, depending on your point of view, either mad or society’s outcasts. The countrified and gospel-inflected “Delta Dawn” tells the story of a Brownsville woman who wanders the streets wearing “a faded rose from days gone by” looking for a “mysterious brown-haired man” who is going to take her to his “mansion in the sky.” The touched protagonist of the funky and horn-fueled “Leave Me Alone (Ruby Red Dress)” also wanders the town, talking to herself and telling everybody who approaches her to, well, leave her alone.

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | In its original 1992 release, 4 Non Blondes’ first and only studio album Bigger, Better, Faster, More! made a multi-platinum mark on the public consciousness, thanks to the quartet’s effortless chemistry and the soulful songcraft of singer Linda Perry. At the time, Entertainment Weekly noted that “the Blondes’ musical grab bag (is) stuffed with jet-propelled folk rock, angst-ridden anthems, high-octane blues and ’90s protest songs.”

On October 13, UMe will celebrate the 25th anniversary of Bigger, Better, Faster, More!’s release with a special vinyl edition of this classic LP, marking its first-ever American vinyl release. In addition to its standard black-vinyl release, the anniversary LP will also be released in a limited Custom Opaque Green colored-vinyl edition that will be available exclusively through the online retailer Sound of Vinyl.

Birthed during the heady ’90s alt-rock explosion, the colorful San Francisco foursome—frontwoman Perry, guitarist Roger Rocha, bassist Christa Hillhouse, and drummer Dawn Richardson—crossed over from the modern-rock charts to the pop mainstream, scoring a major hit single with the anthemic smash “What’s Up?,” which topped the charts in several countries around the world.

Read More »