Rockford, IL | Visit five stores for Rockford Record Crawl on Saturday: Five stores will host the Rockford Record Crawl 2018 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday: Kate’s Pie Shop Cafe & Records, 6685 E. State St.; Culture Shock, 2239 Charles St.; Toad Hall, 2106 Broadway; CD Source, 5723 N. Second St.; and Retro Rock Records, 4675 Bluestem Road, Roscoe. Listen to music, enjoy refreshments and turn in your punch card at the end of the crawl with punches from three of the stores for a chance to win $125 worth of records.
Silver Spring, MD | Hints of trouble in (Joe’s Record) Paradise; owner blames upcoming elections: The Instagram post left vinyl-loving music fans in the Washington area holding their collective breath. On Friday, Johnson Lee, owner of Joe’s Record Paradise in Silver Spring, photographed a Post-it note with a fading black magic marker, reading “Come in for deals this weekend. We may not be around much longer…” For a record store with a long local history and that struggled to reopen in 2016, owner Johnson Lee tells WTOP his post was a bit heavy on the hyperbole. “It was worded a little more ominously than I should have, perhaps,” said Lee, the son of founder Joe Lee, who took over the business in 2009. “It’s been a real tough two years.”
W Hotels launches its own record label after installing recording studios: Pushing music to the forefront of the visitor’s experience, recent innovative moves by global hotel brand W Hotels include adding carefully-curated playlists and catalogues to rooms, creating the Wake Up Call music festival, and installing recording studios in four locations around the world that allow creative guests to express themselves. Taking that appreciation for music a step further, the hotel chain has just announced the launch of its very own record label…Rising pop and R&B star Amber Mark is the first artist to be signed to W Records, and is due to release two digital and two vinyl tracks this month. Plans are in place for three more emerging artists to be signed over the next year.
Islington, UK | Editor’s comment: What can we learn from Alan? …My childhood was spent in record shops. I can’t have been older than Alan’s eight-year-old customer when I started digging through dusty crates for the music that would go on to soundtrack my teenage years – the Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, Pink Floyd – and soon enough I was planning entire day trips around shops I’d found in the Yellow Pages, in towns that were just about accessible by train with the assistance (or resignation) of a long-suffering parent. It seemed like a whole world had opened up to me but in truth those years – late ’90s, early 2000s – were vinyl’s nadir. Sales, despite my pocket money, were unsustainably low; shops were closing or downscaling to focus on easier, more reliable sources of income; industrial investment was minimal or non-existent, with manufacturers left to salvage parts for ailing record presses from decommissioned Eastern European plants. Yet fast-forward 15 years and the picture is completely different…
Fargo, ND | Give music a spin: 6 things to do this weekend in Fargo-Moorhead—Fargo Record Fair: It seems like every year there’s a news story about a vinyl resurgence, but for some music fans, spinning black records never went out of fashion. Collectors of all ages will descend on the El Zagal Shrine, 1429 Third St. N., Fargo, for the annual Fargo Record Fair this Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Some will be looking for old jazz, some hunting for new indie rock, others searching for obscure noise acts. With 30 vendors participating, it’s possible to find the album you’ve been looking for or the one you never knew you needed. Admission $3.
