London, UK | Record store and dubplate-cutting studio Disc World crowdfunds to open in London: A proposed Deptford shopfront would house the 1-800-DUBPLATE vinyl-cutting service and a store for specialist dance music vinyl. A Kickstarter is underway to fund a record store and dubplate-cutting shopfront in Deptford, southeast London. Disc World is seeking £12,500 to set up the store, half of which has already been funded since launching last week. It’s a venture from Chris Royle and Lewis Joyce from 1-800-DUBPLATE, an online vinyl-cutting service. A walk-in cutting studio will be built in the back of the proposed shop while the front will house records “specializing but not limited to underground dance music.” Pledger rewards include a 3×12-inch dubplate cut and a 50-record run of your own music. The campaign ends November 30th.
The Miniature 3-Inch Vinyl Format Is Growing Fast — Disney Is Now on Board: The mini-turntable has seen multiple releases this year from artists like All Time Low and Beastie Boys. Now a new collaboration will see vinyl based on classic animations that span several generations. The Disney/Pixar 3-inch vinyl single series will feature songs from Disney films. Each release also includes a collector’s edition poster and lyric sheet. Singles as part of this collection include “A Whole New World” from Aladdin, “A Part Of Your World” from The Little Mermaid, “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” from The Lion King, and “You’ve Got A Friend In Me” from Toy Story. Also coming is a 3-inch vinyl blind box series with singles from A Charlie Brown Christmas. The blind box series comes in an outer box that reproduces the original album art and includes one of four songs. “Christmas Time Is Here,” “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” “Linus and Lucy,” and “Skating,” are all included.
Chicago, IL | Val was Val’s: The news Saturday that Val’s halla, the beloved and long overlooked Oak Park record store, would close up at the end of November came as a dull thud of secondary pain, 15 months after we all mourned the death of our friend, Val Camilletti. Val was Val’s. And for a decade after most of us had stopped buying CDs, her aura still drew us into her Harrison Street shop from time to time. We searched the bins for something to buy but mainly we just wanted to chat up Val, to bask in her warmth. Shayne Blakeley, Val’s sidekick in the store for nearly 20 years, was left with the fading glow and as he dug deeper, an ever-deeper pile of financial problems with record distributors owed money and, as he said in a Monday morning interview, “the worst first quarter of sales in 20 years.” “The wolves are at the gate and the stress of running this on my own is too much,” he said. Now he is spending his days trying to sell inventory, including music posters and other memorabilia collected over decades. He is also on the internet trying to find a next step for a near 40-year-old who has spent the first decades of his adulthood working for an icon in a fading industry.
Nova Scotia, CA | Murray Deal’s 8,000 country music records are heading west: Amanda Jackson searched for a buyer who would keep her dad’s record collection intact. A Nova Scotian’s massive collection of country music records is heading west to live out its days on a cattle ranch in central B.C. Murray Deal spent nearly six decades lovingly collecting and meticulously cataloguing roughly 8,000 records, which he kept in a music room in his basement. Deal died last year, and his daughter, Amanda Jackson, began searching for a buyer who would appreciate the collection the way its creator did. “I think he’d be happy to know that it’s going to somebody that’s really excited about it and is going to show it off,” Jackson said. That person is Dan Mott, a record collector from Burnaby, B.C., who has ties to Nova Scotia. Mott travelled to Nova Scotia last week and spent two days carefully boxing up the records so they can be shipped to his home. “We were sort of gobsmacked, I guess you could say, when we first walked in and looked at the collection. It was really quite remarkable,” said Mott.
Vinyl is officially back… but so are bootleg records: But not everybody thinks that is a bad thing. Back in the ’60s, the three buzz words among record collectors were – Great White Wonder. This bootleg album of unreleased Bob Dylan material was, and still is, the stuff of record collecting legends. But as Business Insider (BI) notes in its report on the state of vinyl records industry, with the CD boom in the late ’80s and ’90s, industry analysts and most consumers thought that the vinyl records, and bootleg albums along with them, were a thing of the past. But RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) reported that as of this year, vinyl is officially back, and as BI points out, some of the vinyl records are “selling for thousands of dollars.” So it was no surprise that bootleg albums are back in full swing too. Ian Shirley, editor of the Rare Record Price Guide told BI that “there are more bootlegs around today than any other time in the last 20 years.” But also adds that it is not a mass-market, “it’s not like with every record there’s going to be a bootleg.”
Mick Jagger solo album catalog comes to 180-Gram, half-speed remastered vinyl: …The albums are She’s The Boss (1985), Primitive Cool (1987), Wandering Spirit (1993) and Goddess In The Doorway (2001). The quartet of albums amply demonstrate the creative reach of the Rolling Stones frontman as an artist in his own right. Jagger’s solo work shows the broad artistic palette that has influenced countless subsequent rock frontmen. To borrow one of their titles, they’re a timely reminder of what a wandering creative spirit he continues to be. The albums have been newly remastered from analogue tape transfers via the revolutionary Half-Speed Mastering system, by celebrated engineer Miles Showell at London’s Abbey Road Studios. This high audio definition remastering treatment, which creates the finest audio quality vinyl pressings available, was recently used for all the albums in the acclaimed boxed set The Rolling Stones Studio Albums Vinyl Collection 1971 – 2016. The Jagger albums all feature printed inner bags with lyrics.
