Coffee and vinyl are on the menu at a new Wicker Park record store: A new record store set to open in Wicker Park is looking to combine two things Chicagoans are passionate about: music and coffee. Purple Llama Coffee & Records will be a 25-seat café that offers guests far more LPs than your average coffee shop. Located at 2140 W Division Street, the store will carry new and reissued albums (nothing used here), and feature products from local businesses. Purple Llama will serve Chicago-based Counter Culture Coffee and pastries from Floriole Cafe & Bakery, located in Lincoln Park. “We are happy to serve the finest coffees, in addition to a highly curated selection of vinyl records,” the store said on its website.
Owners lift up the needle on Tower’s Dynamite Vinyl store: Tower District record store Dynamite Vinyl is calling it quits after nearly two years in business. That’s the word from co-owners Paul Cruikshank and Michael Kanz in a Facebook post, which states the biggest reason for the closure as fallout from hosting live in-store concerts. “I will miss giving small bands an all-ages (alcohol free) environment. But ultimately – the live stuff is probably what did us in,” the post reads. “Things have changed with small all-ages shows and the drama swirling around them. No fun. We did fine financially – we could have kept doing it – but Michael and I both have careers we love and are paid well for – and without the fun we just couldn’t see it anymore.”
Vinyl renaissance continues: Surprisingly perhaps in this digital age, vinyl LPs are continuing to make a comeback. Although many of us haven’t had a record player for decades (or maybe even never), sales of new vinyl LPs in Belgium topped 267,000 in 2016, a rise of 34% compared with 2015. What was a niche market is now gradually becoming more mainstream. The sales figures come from the Belgian Entertainment Association and appear in an article in Monday’s edition of the daily ‘De Standaard’. A total of 267,453 vinyl albums were sold.
Sydney is getting a new vinyl pressing factory very soon: Big news for Sydney artists, a new vinyl pressing factory is set to open in the coming months, successfully making life a whole lot easier for artists wanting to out their music onto wax. With the boom in vinyl at its peak – to the point where some companies are trying to change the way vinyl records are even played – it makes sense that this factory is being installed, and this will be a big relief for artists who have had to go abroad for vinyl pressings up until now. The press release states “the new plant will be fully self-sufficient with full analogue mastering, a Neumann disc cutting system, stamper making facility, fully automated record presses, and a manual press for specialty records such as picture discs, split and splatter colours.”
