Obese Records Store To Close After 21 Glorious Years: Sad news for the Australian hip-hop world broke last week as Tirren Staaf aka Pegz, founder of Obese Records, announced via Facebook that the Obese Record store would be closing its doors. The iconic record store has been around for 21 years and has been a one of the only places truly dedicated to Australian hip-hop culture.
As demand for vinyl surges, Ozarks record stores try to keep up: As more people ditch digital music, they’re turning to vinyl records. In the last decades vinyl sales have reached recent record highs. According to Nielson, in 2005 0.9 million were sold across the US. Last year alone, record sales hit close to 12 million. It’s a trend that Wes Nichols has watched first hand in his 23 years at Stick it in Your Ear in downtown Springfield.
David Bowie’s ‘Blackstar’ Is Amazon’s Best-Selling Vinyl Album: David Bowie’s ‘Blackstar’ has been named Amazon’s best-selling vinyl album. The vinyl revival is a much explored facet of modern music, with income from vinyl sales in the United States exceeding that of the free-streaming model…The best-selling album of all time on Amazon is David Bowie’s ‘Blackstar’. The singer’s lauded farewell record, it was released to ecstatic reviews earlier this year. Arctic Monkeys’ ‘AM’ sits in second place, with Pink Floyd’s perennial prog favourite ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ arriving in third place.
If you expose David Bowie’s ★ Blackstar sleeve to sunlight, something amazing happens: More Bowie secrets. It’s not a good idea to expose your records to sunlight but one Reddit user has discovered that by leaving the ★ Blackstar gatefold (not the actual vinyl) out in the sun, a hidden starfield is revealed. The stars appear on a thin sheet of paper which sits behind the gatefold’s die-cut star. It’s not yet clear whether the change on the paper is permanent or temporary. It does seem likely that the design is intentional because the thinner paper isn’t found anywhere else on the cover and doesn’t appear to serve another purpose.
My 2 Cents: Record Store Day is losing its groove: …I’m all for supporting small businesses, record stores in particular. But the way to do it is to visit them often, see what new and used music they have and make purchases once in a while. The more you do this, the less you need a special day to purchase marked-up limited releases…I’ve spoken with a few friends who are fellow vinyl nerds. This year, we shared the same experience of reacting to Record Store Day with a shrug. That’s because for us, our local record stores get our attention (and our money) more than just one day a year.
