Thoughts on Record Store Day from Someone Who Lives in the Desert

Apparently this is my first post in quite awhile. Huh. I suppose I've had a lot going on, what with finishing my dissertation and gaining super-secret doctor-powers and all.* But still. I hate to neglect ye olde blogge. I've actually been writing quite a bit in my new pitiful-for-normal-people-but-enormous-for-overworked-grad-students amount of free time: bits of songs, bits of poems, a new short-story-type-thing and a few nonfiction narratives...and that's not even counting the two essays I'm revising for (hopefully) publication. So yeah...lest the lack of blog-activity lead you to believe that I haven't been following through on my promise to write more: I'm writing a lot. But I'm also playing outside a lot, and cooking huge meals a lot. And those three things combined bring me as close to my ideal zen-puppy-like existence as I can rightly get.

So typing that into GIS made me aware that this is apparently a thing.

As you might have guessed from the title of this post, though, all that blather has fuck-all to do with what I want to write about right this second, which is my ambivalence re: Record Store Day. If you don't know what Record Store Day is, you probably just closed this tab and went across the room and threw on your favorite Third Eye Blind CD, or A-Ha cassette, or Kanye West iMusic thing-a-ma-jigger, or Native American ululation wax cylinder, or whatever the hell you listen to music on instead of vinyl. If you're still here, I'm writing specifically in response to this article, which I think pretty evenhandedly explains why I found it hard to get excited about Record Store Day this year.

In fact, now that I've linked to that article, I realize that all I really want to do is rearticulate the same points less articulately. Which is sort of pointless...but then again, isn't a blog, by definition, pretty pointless? Here we GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I don't have to explain myself to you.

So, Record Store Day. A day in which lots of brick-and-mortar, independent, and often financially embattled music stores attempt to attract new (and presumably repeating) customers once a year by getting in extremely limited selections of already rare and obscure vinyl and CD albums, singles, and EPs, and charging well over what "regular" vinyl albums, singles, and EPs would cost to the lucky few who actually get in line early enough in the morning to snag the rarest stuff while sending everyone else home dejected. Make absolutely no sense yet? Moving on.

Next, those who do get their hands on the rare stuff sell it on eBay for an inflated price, and many such albums pass from owner to owner this way for months or years, never leaving the packaging because to actually take the music out and, you know, listen to it would ruin the item's collector's value.

Better still, there appears to be no logical reason that this hipster-consumerist (hipsumerist?) holiday couldn't easily be executed in such a way that would actually entice more people to buy vinyl and frequent their local stores.

Instead, we have a situation in which:

1. Much of the music purchased on Record Store Day never even gets listened to in the first place.

2. Much of the profits made off of those rare pieces of vinyl and CDs never actually go to artists, or to record stores but instead to private eBay sellers.

3. Many, many people want to buy something, and yet there is a purposely limited supply for some reason, meant to enhance the specialness of record collecting, I guess.

4. Many customers are turned off from going back to small, local stores after having to wait in line for hours during their first-ever visit since the staff can't handle the demand RSD generates one day a year because they aren't set up for the indie rock equivalent of Black Friday.

5. Ultimately, the whole experience ends up replicating the stereotypes of small, independent record stores as nerd havens where people who aren't in the know get treated like ignorant Philistines and vinyl purchasing as a hobby only for people who are interested in paying fifty dollars per album and competing with other buyers to score the limitedest limited edition of everything.

"Fuck you for not being me!"

Tell me again why this was a good idea?

I'm all for getting people out to independent record stores. Moscow has a great indie store, Deadbeat Records, staffed by a bunch of great people, and they've thrown pretty excellent RSD shindigs the last two years. I went last year and poked around the "used" bin for fun, bought a few cheap singles, and then went home. I didn't even try for any of the limited stuff because, despite having called the store months early and had them order copies of four different albums for me. They simply didn't get them in, they said, explaining that you can ask the RSD mothership for whatever you want for your store, but the odds that you'll actually get it in stock (especially in Moscow, Idaho) are pretty low.

What's infuriating is that just at the one store I stopped in at, there were five or six of us customers ready to throw down around a hundred bucks or so each on new records, but because of RSD's manufactured limited-edition nonsense, that was five hundred bucks that our local store didn't get because they weren't able to stock any of the things that any of us big spenders had hoped to buy. I ended up spending my money on used climbing gear and like to think that my life was the better for it, but the whole episode just drove home how mixed a message RSD gives to the consumers that it's supposed to be romancing.

This year there was only one thing I wanted: Phish's first-ever vinyl release of their first album, Junta. I knew for an absolute fact that there wasn't going to be a copy at Deadbeat, so I just fished (hah) around online for a few days, then by the morning of RSD, when copies started popping up on eBay for $300, I gave up and went and did other things, resigned to the fact that there was no way to get a new piece of vinyl by my favorite band because of Record Store Day.

Which leads me to my primary suggestion for making RSD more consumer-friendly (and thus more record-store-friendly): cut out this limited edition bullshit and cater to people who just want to own and listen to music. Isn't that what buying music is about, listening to it? And isn't that supposed to be the draw of vinyl, that it sounds better? Do record stores want to encourage "record collection" or do they want to stay in business while disseminating awesome music to people who want to pay to enjoy it?

Why not just have a Record Store Day where lots of your normal inventory is on sale? People can still get albums by their favorite artists, and there's still an incentive to come to the store on a particular day, but it's just a price thing.

Or, better yet, why not have a Record Store Day where lots of new vinyl albums are released, but are released on a non-limited-edition basis? This is what has, ultimately, come to gall me the most about RSD. People will stand in line for hours and gouge each other's eyes out for, say, a new M. Ward 7 inch, and yet much of M. Ward's catalog of normal, non-special-release albums are more or less unavailable on vinyl unless you're willing to pay exorbitant prices for old pressings on eBay. It's frustrating to me that labels are willing to go through the effort of making goofy limited edition pressings of things like Feistodon while entire discographies of their best artists are begging for a normally-priced, normally-alloted vinyl release.

Take Phish's Junta for example. The pressing of the album that came out on Saturday was limited to 5000. Knowing both the Phish and audiophile communities as I do, I can more or less guarantee that a press four times or more this size would have sold out just as well. In addition, the band regularly releases "special" 7 inches like Mike Gordon's Moss Remixes and the Two Soundchecks single when most of its studio albums have never been released on vinyl, and the few that have are well out of print and can only be heard by people willing to pay upwards of $500 for one record. Why not participate in the next ten Record Store Days by releasing one studio album per year at a price that most of your fans can afford and in a quantity that won't result in pile-ups at the cash register and absurd eBay auctions? Such an approach would make stores a ton of money, get music into the hands of the fans that want to hear it, and get rid of all the manufactured drama that so many people assume is inherent in vinyl "collecting."

How does this not make sense? WHY ARE WE LIVING IN HELL

* The power that I gained was actually just a +1 to my Number Of Cheeses Combinable On A Grilled Cheese skill, which was already at 3 due to previous leveling up.