Cincinnati record stores are booming. This book explains why. If “Queen City Records” had been published a year ago, it would have been considerably thinner. A vinyl boom is taking place here, and Cassie Lipp was trying to keep up with stores popping up as she was writing “Queen City Records,” a book that documents independently owned record shops, old and new, of Greater Cincinnati. The book features the photographs of Cincinnati native and Los Angeles resident Mike Spitz, who created a similar work in 2015 titled “The Record Store Book,” an overview of L.A.’s vinyl-shop scene. Lipp wrote the text for “Queen City Records,” which is scheduled for release this month. As Spitz and Lipp worked on the book, three stores that stock vinyl opened for business this year: MetaModern Music in Oakley, Jet Age Records in Newport and Herzog Music Downtown. A fourth, Morrow Audio Records if Florence, opened after the book was completed.
Old school gets new life, new audience with vinyl record shop: Throughout their childhood, sisters Brenna Gentry and Calvert Gentry McMahan spent hours upon hours listening to their parents’ vinyl record collection. Years later, the fourth-generation Franklin, Tennessee, natives have brought back their youthful musical passion by co-founding Luna Record Shop at The Factory in Franklin, Tennessee. “Records were our first experience with music, as well as our first medium for music,” said McMahan. “Of course, we slowly moved to cassettes then CDs, but then came back around to vinyl once we realized the quality was much better than the compressed music we had become accustomed to.” Gentry’s love for music — and record shops in particular — have existed since she was a child.
Holiday Gift Ideas for the Vinyl Enthusiast in Your Life, Instead of yet another vinyl record, get your music lover something different this year. These holiday gift ideas for the vinyl enthusiast in your life are fun, decorative, and ingenious. If you know someone or are someone who collects vinyl, you know the hobby doesn’t stop at just the records themselves. Frankly, it’s more than just enthusiasm—it’s obsession. But that’s not a bad thing! To prove it, we’ve come up with some holiday gift ideas for the vinyl enthusiast in your life that will show you how many different ways they can include vinyl records in their life.
Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley, Dylan Ramp Up Box Sets As 2017 Reissues Set Record: The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan are among artists leading this year’s record crop of musical box sets. The multimillion-reissue bandwagon exceeds last year’s peak, with a lot of classic albums returning in anniversary and deluxe editions – by U2, the Eagles, Prince, Radiohead and The Smiths, among others. New and announced titles, including vinyl reissues, are currently running at more than 630 for mainstream artists so far in 2017, an increase from the approximate 520 number at the same point in the year from the same record companies in 2016. The number surged in the last few weeks before Black Friday, Cyber Monday and now the first weekend of December – the weekend seen by eBay as the peak time for physical sales of vinyl, CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray, even old videotapes and cassettes.
Indies feel pushed out of vinyl boom as ‘dad rock’ sells in record numbers, Small labels report lengthy production delays as big stars monopolise Europe’s two main pressing plants: “We’ve been making records continuously for 20 years and the lead time has gone up from three weeks to three months,” says Gerald Short, founder of Jazzman Records. “The major labels have the leverage with the pressing plants due to the volume of business they can offer, which I can understand. Most record companies in the UK use plants in Europe these days, and at the moment the pressing plants just cannot cope with the demand. They’re working 24/7.” Jonny Trunk, founder of Trunk Records, agrees: “I’ve never seen anything like it: it’s a gold rush, and that is leading to delays. If a busy pressing plant gets an order from a major label saying, for example, ‘We have 20,000 Dire Straits LPs to press’, then the plant tends to drop production for smaller labels and press the big order.”
The best music books of 2017 for the record collector in your life. Maintaining a healthy bookshelf is as important as keeping your records in good order, and 2017 has been a particularly fruitful year for new and updated publications dealing directly with the science, art and culture of recorded sound. From coffee table tomes exploring the history of hi-fi, to hip-hop photo books, post-punk memoirs and collections of iconic cover artwork, we’ve collected the best that this year had to offer, for your own wish lists or to satisfy someone else’s. As with our favourite albums of 2017, rather than link to Amazon, we have tried to find independent booksellers or go directly to the publisher for each book, where possible.
Forget Vinyl. Forget the Cloud. In the Future We’ll Listen to Music on UV-Cured 3D-Printed Resin, Musicians, developers, and inventors prove that there’s more to records than vinyl. The first time I heard the White Stripes, I remember thinking, “This is high quality rock and roll. Pure and simple.” There’s something undeniably authentic about the unabashed, heart-on-sleeve music of the White Stripes. It fits seamlessly into the continuum of music history, bridging the past with the present, somehow sounding like both. When Jack White started the label Third Man Records in 2009, he intended “to bring a spontaneous and tangible aesthetic back into the record business.” What does that mean? Well, for one thing, it means making actual records. Like the music of the White Stripes, Third Man’s vinyl records combine tradition and innovation.
