Columbus, OH | Record store/recording studio/craft beer bar opening soon: Troy Stacy’s new business isn’t as much about what he can do as what you can do. The marketing and music industry veteran is opening Craft & Vinyl on Aug. 15 at 1806 W. 5th Ave. near Grandview Heights. It’s a venture that combines record shop, recording studio and craft beer bar under its 2,000-square-foot roof. While vinyl and beer sales will drive the success, Stacy’s passion is on the studio side. In his music industry days, he worked on several successful albums for both TVT Records and Interscope Records, including the soundtracks to the movies Blade and Bulworth. Those bona fides are on the studio walls, not as a way to brag, but to show that success in the industry can be achieved without leaving Columbus.
Oakland, CA | The 5 best spots to score vinyl records in Oakland: Is vinyl your thing? Hoodline crunched the numbers to find the top vinyl record sources in Oakland, using both Yelp data and our own secret sauce to produce a ranked list of where to venture next time you’re in the market…Topping the list is 1-2-3-4 Go Records. Located at 420 40th St., Suite 5 (between Webster Street and Shafter Avenue) in Mosswood, it’s the highest rated vinyl spot in Oakland, boasting 4.5 stars out of 92 reviews on Yelp. The LPs (plus CDs and cassettes) are well organized by genre. The shop specializes in punk but also carries lots of jazz, indie rock and world music. It also hosts occasional in-store performances in Oakland and at its sister outlet in San Francisco.
Charlotte, NC | Fania Records’ Legacy Lives On With New Owners: ‘It’s The Culture’: Fania Records has a singular place in music history, mostly because it practically gave birth to the genre that became known as salsa. The musicians, singers, composers and arrangers who made music for the label will tell you that the song forms already existed — guaracha, son, mambo, cha cha cha, merengue — but what they did was give it a 1970s New York City swagger. The music produced on Fania albums can also be considered the soundtrack of the Afro-Caribbean political awakening in the U.S. northeast. Puerto Ricans and Cuban-Americans flexed their political and musical muscles at the same time, gaining influence in both arenas along the way. The storied legacy became a tangle of probate hearings and misplaced tape masters when co-founder Jerry Masucci died in 1997.
Dublin, IE | ‘If Drake can’t shift a bulk of physical albums, what hope have Irish musicians?’ …A further sign of the new music reality also came into sharp focus last week when it was reported that physical sales for Scorpion, the No 1 album world’s top-selling performer, hip-hop artist, Drake, were just 29,000 copies per week in the US and close to 6,500 copies in the UK. These were the lowest sales figures for the week’s biggest-selling album in the States since they first began running the numbers in 1991. The trend is unlikely to be that different in Ireland where Spotify has now become the ‘go to’ platform for accessing and paying for music. We live in an era of customised playlists delivered in flavours to match the ever-changing mood of today’s music fans. Increasingly, the choice for many new artists and fans favours random tunes released more regularly. So tracks have become uncoupled from albums in the same way that news articles have become separated from newspapers and TV shows from TV stations.
Danny Elfman’s Mission Impossible Score Is Getting a Vinyl Release for the First Time: For the first time Danny Elfman, the man known for scoring a wide swath of American cinema, will have his score for Mission: Impossible available on vinyl. Featuring liner notes by Brian Satterwhite, this two-LP set will be available in either Red Light / Green Light vinyl or strictly Translucent Red. The former will be limited to only 1,000 copies. In Consequence of Sounds’ exclusive interview with Mondo’s record label manager Mo Shafeek, he discussed the decision behind finally releasing the music for the Mission: Impossible and which future properties are next in line for a vinyl recording. Shafeek noted that his sense of nostalgia for guilty pleasure 90’s blockbuster cinema lead him to considering the film in the first place, noting his belief that it has one Elfman’s best scores. Unfortunately he was unable to confer with the man himself due to bandwidth.
Copy of Prince’s The Black Album sells for record-breaking $27,500. Rare vinyl LP from 1987 becomes most expensive item ever sold on the Discogs marketplace. A vinyl copy of Prince’s fabled 1987 LP known as The Black Album has sold for $27,500, making it the most expensive record ever sold on online music marketplace Discogs. The album was withheld from release by Prince, who described having an epiphanic experience that prompted him to scrap it. He told Rolling Stone in 1991: “I suddenly realised that we can die at any moment, and we’d be judged by the last thing we left behind. I didn’t want that angry, bitter thing to be the last thing.” His decision meant there are just a handful of promotional vinyl copies in existence. The copy sold on Discogs is particularly rare, one of the 500,000 retail versions that Prince ordered to be destroyed. The anonymous owner is a former employee of a Toronto record pressing plant, who saved one of the copies.
