These Are the Top-Selling Albums & Singles of Record Store Day 2017, As Vinyl Album Sales Surge 213%: The 10th installment of Record Store Day (April 22) continued to drive big sales of music at independent retailers, according to Nielsen Music. The company reports that in the tracking week ending April 27, album sales at indie stores increased 194 percent compared to the previous week — the largest weekly gain in the retail sector in the history of Record Store Day…Thus, it’s no surprise to see that vinyl album sales grew 213 percent to 547,000 sold (across all retailers, not just indies). That’s the biggest non-Christmas season week for vinyl albums since Nielsen began electronically tracking point-of-sale music purchases in 1991.
Great Lakes Brewing Company’s tasting room to transform into vinyl record shop: It’s no secret that Cleveland loves its beer and its rock and roll. When Great Lakes Brewing Company launched its Turntable Pils in April 2016, it combined the best of both worlds. Since its inception, the Czech-style pilsner has fueled musical collaborations throughout the city. From 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. Thursday, May 4, the brewery’s tasting room, 2701 Carroll Ave., will become a one-night vinyl record pop-up shop. Local shops Loop, Young Kings and Blue Arrow Records will be selling records throughout the evening, and each will send a guest DJ to spin during the party.
Beyoncé unveils $300 Lemonade vinyl box set: Beyoncé has announced a $300 made-to-order vinyl box set for her epic 2016 album Lemonade. The deluxe package includes lemon-yellow vinyl (for the album’s first vinyl pressing) and a 600-page book containing “hundreds of never-before-seen photos” from the making of Lemonade. The academic and author Dr. Michael Eric Dyson provides the book’s foreword, and there are poems from Beyoncé’s favorite wordsmith Warsan Shire, the Somali-British poet quoted on Lemonade.
Radiohead announce reissue of OK Computer featuring 3 new tracks: The OKNOTOK BOXED EDITION will ship in July, featuring a black box emblazoned with a dark image of a burned copy of OK COMPUTER containing three heavyweight 180 gram black 12″ vinyl records and a hardcover book containing more than thirty artworks (many of which have never been seen before) and full lyrics to all the tracks (except the ones that haven’t really got any lyrics). Under this weighty tome are yet more surprises: a notebook containing 104 pages from Thom Yorke’s library of scrawled notes of the time, a sketchbook containing 48 pages of Donwood and Tchock’s ‘preparatory work’ and a C90 cassette mix tape compiled by the band, taken from OK COMPUTER session archives and demo tapes.
Freaky Formats: The most hypnotic moiré effect record sleeves: “My criteria is… when you look at a record and go ‘WTF?’” A collector’s collector, if anyone’s got an eye for the unusual it’s DJ Food. Keeper of one of the country’s most eclectic record collections, he’s spent the last two decades supplementing his vast archive of beats and breaks with forgotten relics from vinyl’s more obscure niches. A graphic designer with a passion for comic book culture and visual ephemera, his attention to record sleeves and packaging is second nature. Having let us into his peerless collection of flexi-discs we were blown away by the variety of weird and wonderful records that remained largely undocumented in his impeccably organised shelves.
