Alli on the Job – Stocking Vinyl at Waterloo Records: Record sales may have peaked in the 80s, but they are not going down without a fight. Forbes just released an article, saying this year, Vinyl sales will reach 40 million! For this Alli on the Job, Allison meets up with Patrick Floyd at Austin’s iconic Waterloo Records to see what all the fuss over the grandfather of CDs is about.
Stained Class Records gives Toronto a heavy metal injection, The new record shop throws a grand opening in-store on February 18: Who knew Toronto would get so excited about a heavy metal record store? Inti Paredes and Ian Kilpatrick opened Stained Class Records a month ago in the back of Parkdale Platters, and already the vinyl bins are getting slightly thin. “I guess a lot of people feel the same way we felt – that there weren’t really any shops in the city for heavy metal,” says Paredes from behind the counter. “A surprising number of people still like heavy metal – more than we thought.”
Love vinyl? Don’t miss this daylong record fair and concert in Dallas March 4: Crate Diggers is a daylong fair and concert that brings vinyl vendors together with the people who love the medium most for a day of “digging and dancing,” according to Liz Maddux, community manager for Discogs. The event began three years ago as a one-time pop-up in Portland, but met such enthusiasm, it gradually expanded to other areas of the country. Beginning at noon, about 30 vendors from around the region will set up shop at Club Dada where patrons can come and dig through the goods.
Vinyl record fair heading to Birmingham is set to cash in on sales revival, Fans of vinyl records will be in their element at this Digbeth event: A huge record fair is to be staged in Birmingham, with rare gems and fantastic bargains among the discs on offer. With record sales now exceeding digital downloads, lovers of all things vinyl will be in their element at the VIP Big Brum Record Fair. It will be held on Saturday, February 4, at Birmingham South and City College, Digbeth. The UK has witnessed a huge resurgence in vinyl sales over the last decade and last year it hit a peak when it topped a massive three million.
This Company Presses the Ashes of the Dead into Vinyl Records: It might seem sacrilegious, but a group of creatives in the United Kingdom have taken to memorializing their lost loved ones, not only by photographs, recorded voices, or scattered ashes, but a combination of all three. They’ve used pressed human ashes to create vinyl records. Jason Leach’s company, And Vinyly, first gained media attention for this practice in 2010, as a way to literally preserve a part of the deceased along with something that reminds you of them. This Youtube video called Hearing Madge by Aeon Video portrays how the practice of pressing ashes of the dead onto records is either an “odd novelty” or a “tender remembrance.”
Toronto company hopes to make vinyl records with new technology: A Toronto company will become the first in Canada to produce old-school vinyl records, using a technology that’s brand new. Toronto CD and DVD manufacturer Microforum has been looking to take a spin on vinyl for the past couple years but there was always a problem: the only option meant buying machines with the same old technology that produced records for our parents and grandparents. Noble Musa, Microforum’s vice-president of sales and marketing, visited some vinyl manufacturing plants and returned unwilling to take the risk.
Popular music magazine plots reunion tour in print: Then a few years later a funny thing started happening in the music world. Audiophiles yearning for a more tactile experience turned to a medium largely thought to be dead—vinyl records. Part of the LP revival was due to nostalgia, but music lovers also wanted something they could hold, keep, and collect—something that lasts. Now Paste, which is based just east of Atlanta, is betting that devotees to the printed word, particularly in-depth stories about music and pop-culture, feel a similar yearning for the old-fashioned feel of ink and paper. Paste Quarterly, the title’s first physical book in nearly seven years, hits mailboxes this March.
For local musicians, it’s important to put their music on the record: One of the additions to the Lexington Music Awards this year is a category that is fairly common to music awards: album of the year. Sure, the album might have many physical guises now, well into the 21st century: a digital download, a compact disc or a traditional vinyl album that gave the product its name. The concept, however, is the same: a collection of recorded songs that is a lasting musical statement from an artist. But in an industry that has diversified far beyond tradition in recent decades to present music via streaming services, bite-size sales that allow consumers to listen to and buy pieces of an album instead of the entire product and online sharing of recorded and live music, how important is an actual album in 2017?
