Gainesville, GA | Moe’s Record Shop is moving. Here’s when and where. Moe’s Record Shop is moving on up — not to the east side, but three doors down from its current location. The record store is moving from its 105 Bradford St. NE address in downtown Gainesville to 119 Bradford St. NE, which previously housed Thrasherville Skateshop. Owner Moe Lyons hopes to be set up in his new digs by April 25 — four years to the day since launching Moe’s Record Shop in Flowery Branch. The store has occupied 105 Bradford St. NE since 2020. “I just saw an opportunity,” Lyons said. “I’ve grown a lot, so there will be an opportunity to expand some more (in the new space). The timing was right.” Moving from roughly 500 square feet to some 2,000, Lyons plans to add CDs and cassettes to his shop’s offerings, in addition to further expanding his already sizable record collection and potentially hosting live music “from time to time.”
Detroit, MI | Record Store Day carries the right tune: Cue those turntables: It’s time to kick out the jams. On April 22, local independent record stores will open up shop for Record Store Day 2023. Record Store Day, held internationally, was launched in 2007 to give employees and customers the chance to gather and celebrate the independent record store culture. In addition, record companies release new music or re-release albums on vinyl not available elsewhere. That could include picture discs and LPs from bands no longer together. “Record Store Day started out when vinyl was making a comeback,” said Davey Taylor, who with wife Lisa Taylor owns Weirdsville Records at 61 Macomb Place in Mount Clemens. “It’s about helping the mom-and-pop shops. Sometimes you get a lot of new customers that have never been to the store or new people who just got a record player.”
Boise, ID | Yea! Record Store Day! It’s a weekend-long celebration that feels like a special holiday (think if the Fourth of July and NYE had a baby) — and it only happens once a year. On Saturday, April 22, hundreds of music fans and vinyl collectors will line up (some overnight) outside The Record Exchange to get their hands on 300 exclusive Record Store Day releases. According to a press release, these exclusives are only, I repeat, only available at independent record stores, including a one-time pressing of a 2020 Taylor Swift live recording (cue up the Swifties). Other releases include: Pearl Jam, The 1975, Mac Miller (as Larry Lovestein), Miles Davis, Beach House, Stevie Nicks, Carole King, Grateful Dead, Duran Duran, The Cure, Ramones, Madonna, Wilco, The Black Keys, Van Halen, Dolly Parton, Orville Peck, Billy Joel, Elton John and many more. Throughout the extended weekend, The Record Exchange will offer sales on vinyl, video, apparel and more, as well as the debut of a new limited-edition T-shirt designed by Boise artist and BW illustrator Jerms Lanningham.
Northampton, MA | Turnin’ the tables: Vinyl albums making a resurgence: When digital downloads became widely available in the early 2000s and subsequently surpassed sales of physical music, the music industry and the public had all but signed the death certificate for local record stores, resigned to the idea that music consumption through vinyl albums and CDs was firmly on the road to obsolescence. In fact, a March 2010 edition of The Valley Advocate even references Northampton music store Turn It Up! as one of the Valley’s last outposts of what was referred to as “old school” music-buying. “There was a period where people would ask us what we were going to do when we went out of business,” said Patrick Pezzati, owner and founder of Turn It Up! However, it turns out the numerous speculators were wrong. After nearly three decades in business, the Northampton shop’s pulse is still strong in the Valley, selling physical media products to this day. Pezzati also maintains locations of Turn It Up! in Montague and Brattleboro, Vermont. “We went from being cool to uncool to cool again. And we’re still here.”
Alexandria, VA | Crooked Beat Records is moving to Del Ray… after Record Store Day on April 22: Crooked Beat Records will move from Old Town North to its new Del Ray home the week after Record Store Day on April 22 (Saturday), owner Bill Daly tells ALXnow. The store’s last day at at 802 N. Fairfax Street will be on Saturday, April 29, after which it will be open on weekends. The new store at 2417 Mount Vernon Avenue in Del Ray will likely open in June. “I’ve been starting to move in little by little,” Daly said of the new location. “I just installed the speakers for the stereo system.” A former DJ at North Carolina State University, Daly worked for a record shop chain for years before founding Crooked Beat Records in 1997 in Raleigh. He moved the business to Adams Morgan in D.C. in 2004 and then to Alexandria in 2016. Daly is now restocking his used vinyl records with a few estate sale deals. “We haven’t been buying used records for more than a year to free up storage space,” he said. “Our used records are depleted 80%, and I’m now in talks to pick up 20,000 records in an estate collection.”
Pompano Beach, FL | Nostalgia and a “deeper sound” help keep local record stores open: When my dad moved up the coast in the early 2000s, he decided to leave his collection of vinyl records with me. Since I was a small child, I had been enchanted with those records, inspecting the dusty covers that filled a bookshelf in his house and listening to them on his old stereo, mesmerized by the needle coasting along in the groove. When they came into my possession as a teenager, I was ecstatic. My quest to find a functioning turntable on which to play my new collection led me to a little hole-in-the-wall shop in Wilton Manors called Kelly’s Klassics. It was a small room filled to the brim with records on shelves, in boxes and piles on the floor, sold dirt cheap. The shop’s friendly proprietor, Kelly Massing, kept neither regular operating hours nor a cash register. For me it was like finding a tiny sanctuary where Saturday afternoons were spent discovering timeless music from throughout the ages that I would have never found elsewhere.
Nashville, TN | As Sales Soar, Vinyl Record Plant in Nashville Plans Expansion: Comeback of Vinyl Record Sales Prompts United Record Pressing To Expand Manufacturing Facility. A 75-year-old vinyl pressing company in Nashville, Tennessee, plans to invest $10.8 million to expand its manufacturing plant to meet growing customer demand as vinyl records continue to make a comeback. United Record Pressing will expand production capacity and improve equipment as part of the project, according to a Thursday release from the Tennessee Department of Economic & Community Development. The privately held company is expected to more than double its employee headcount in Tennessee with the addition of 209 new workers to support the larger facility. Once thought dead after the introduction of compact discs in the late 1980s, vinyl record sales have soared in the past decade as millennials and Gen Z prefer owning music on physical objects instead of digital files. Professional DJs also prefer vinyl due to its sound quality. Singer Taylor Swift released four versions of her latest album, “Midnights,” each with a different colored vinyl record.
Atlanta, GA | New book ‘Atlanta Record Stores: An Oral History’ explores how vinyl has survived over decades: Atlanta-based music journalist Chad Radford has spent decades collecting vinyl from the city’s independent record stores. During this time, the founder of RADATL.com and former music editor at Creative Loafing has gotten to know the people behind the counters and the stories behind the stores. His new book, “Atlanta Record Stores: An Oral History,” is a collection of first-person accounts exploring how vinyl has survived new technology from 8 tracks to CDs to streaming and why the industry continues to thrive. In this interview, Radford spoke with “City Lights” senior producer Kim Drobes about his new book.
