8/30/2023 0 Comments Records store day 2022The event needs to be postponed until these catastrophic production logjams are alleviated and the organisers must consult with shop owners about the best way to help them celebrate this unique culture in the future. Will there be shops to celebrate when the racks are threadbare and retail prices continue to rocket? I hope RSD can reconfigure itself as a genuine friend to record shops. We are part of a long established musical ecosystem and now, in no small part due to RSD, we are becoming ever more impeded in fulfilling our duties. The job of the record shop in its simplest terms is to sell records. Instore tours – crucial for promotion and first-week sales – have been cancelled and rescheduled artists are missing out on the chart positions they should expect entire summer touring schedules are being scrapped because there is such uncertainty about when the physical product will materialise. The administrative ramifications are hugely consuming for shops and the economic impact for independent artists and labels is devastating. We have online customer pre-orders that were placed 12 months ago for albums that have been delayed so frequently that it feels futile to set a new hypothetical release date. The logistics of the celebration now affect every month of the year, riding roughshod over carefully planned campaigns. Even shops that opt out altogether are suffering long term thanks to continued stock delays and shortages which are exacerbated by the RSD production schedule. Inevitably, many people responded, “If you don’t like it, don’t take part.” But this is perhaps the greatest modern mistruth of RSD. When I first got a glimpse of the sheer scale of what was in production, I suggested on social media that the best thing for the whole record community would have been to take a year out. (Don’t even mention the shortage on coloured vinyl, the lifeblood of RSD.) New pressing plants opening in Middlesbrough and Gothenburg are cause for optimism, but even their added capacity pales compared with demand.Īnd yet, these 411 records – among them, yep, four Bowie releases and one Prince – will be ready and awaiting sale on 23 April. Whereas vinyl would typically take 12 weeks to produce, we’re now looking at nine months for a short run of 12-inch vinyl. There is an international shortage of the various components required in vinyl manufacture, as well as a backlog exacerbated by last year’s pop-heavy release schedule. Thanks to Brexit and the pandemic, we simply can’t make enough records. This year, RSD offers 411 new releases, a fact that should leave those in the physical music business seething. Photograph: Mark Humphrey/APĬritics have long derided the event’s penchant for novelty discs and lack of discerning curation. Music lovers queue outside Jack White’s Third Man Records in Nashville on Record Store Day 2015. But what was once a shot in the arm for physical retail is now an albatross around the neck of the establishment it purports to help. This year, on 23 April, it’s a return to business as usual as record stores around the world celebrate the 15th annual Record Store Day (RSD) with help from Taylor Swift, its starriest ambassador yet (who’s releasing a seven-inch to mark the event). You may have seen eager shoppers queueing outside record shops of all sizes up and down the country, wearing face masks as well as the usual thick coats and scarves to brave the pre-opening hours chill perhaps you saw an obligatory news puff piece about how “vinyl is back” as the David Bowie and Prince estates scraped together yet another previously unreleased artefact. After the 2020 edition was cancelled – it was scheduled for what became the middle of the UK’s first lockdown – the organisers staged separate release “drops” later that year, and again in 2021. Even in the age of social distancing, Record Store Day survived during the pandemic.
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