Ireland | Vinyl ‘super-fans’ help bring €12.1m turnover for Golden Discs: Golden Discs has posted a profit of €173,704 for 2017 following what it says was a continued resurgence in the sale of vinyl records. The company reported €12.1 million in turnover for the year ending December 2017, when it opened two new stores in Dublin along with new outlets in Limerick and Wexford. Last year’s profit also compared favourably with the company’s profit of €173,000 for 2016, when its accounts for the year covered an 18-month period. Vinyl sales were up over 50% compared with the previous year, which is expected to continue this year to give Golden Discs its strongest year for sales of the format since the 1980s.
Vancouver, CA | Compact discs whither? Not so fast, say Vancouver indie record stores. Rumours of CDs’ death have been great exaggerated, says Red Cat Records co-owner Dave Gowans. …The Courier reached out to a handful of independent music stores in Vancouver to make sense of the CD conundrum, and got input from shop managers from Red Cat, Beat Street, Highlife, Neptoon and Audiopile, along with Ryan Dyck, the label manager behind Vancouver’s Mint Records. Prevailing trends emerged across the board in each interview…It’s little surprise that each outlet reported vinyl outselling CDs. Some were a 60/40 split, others reported an 80/20 difference. Mint Records releases typically see a 50 per cent run of vinyl, with the remainder split equally between CD and cassette. Yes, the most outdated, useless and worst sounding playback format imaginable is making a comeback.
Ontario, CA | Viryl Technologies launches online “global pressing plant”: …Traditionally, records are pressed at a specific location, or several locations in a handful of major markets, before being sent to countries around the globe; this process is coordinated between labels, pressing plants, and distributors. A new scheme called PhonoHive, from Viryl Technologies, allows labels to submit orders online, selecting the quantities, location, and shipping date it needs. “One lacquer will be cut, and from the mother as many stampers as necessary will be made and shipped to the production plants to ensure quality,” shares VT. “Test pressings will be completed at PhonoHive HQ and once approved the job will be distributed to plants for production. All WarmTone machines are connected via “the cloud” and can talk to one another…”
Little Rock, AK | Viva cassettes! Joey Lucas of Little Rock’s Sleepcvlt talks tapes. The resurgent popularity of vinyl records over the past 10 years shouldn’t surprise anyone. Audiophiles vouch for what they call a “warmer” sound, and people are nostalgic for 12-by-12-inch artwork. Cassettes don’t usually hold the same kind of nostalgia — especially for people raised on LPs — but Joey Lucas fell in love with cassette tapes at an early age. “I remember my mother taking me to get my first tape. I didn’t have a record player, but I had a tape player and there were just so many more tapes than records at the time,” Lucas said. Now, he’s carved out a niche for himself in the small-but-mighty cassette industry, where the demand for physical media means that cassette manufacturers, like Nashville’s National Audio Co., actually operate with a backlog.
Vancouver, WA | Everybody Has a Story: Mom’s gift of music kept on giving: I became enamored of music at a young age. Mom was a music teacher. We had a piano and a record player and many LPs and 78s. Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Bach and Beethoven. Around the time I turned 10, I had a transistor radio that I listened to, full blast, while I wandered the neighborhood. “The Battle of New Orleans,” “A Big Hunk O’ Love,” “Cathy’s Clown,” “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini” and Chubby Checker’s “The Twist”! I still know the lyrics to every song! In 1962, when I was in seventh grade, I began going to Stark’s Record Store in Bellingham each Saturday. My mother gave me a check, each week, for $1.02 — $.98 for a 45 plus $.04 for the tax!
David Bowie’s Mid-Eighties Work Collected for Massive ‘Loving the Alien’ Box Set. 15-LP or 11-CD collection boasts three studio albums, a remix compilation, two unreleased live LPs and a 2018 reworking of ‘Never Let Me Down.’ David Bowie‘s mid-Eighties career will be explored in the new box set Loving the Alien (1983-1988), a massive collection that gathers the late icon’s albums, live LPs and more from the era. The 11-CD or 15-LP Loving the Alien, due out October 12th, features three Bowie studio albums – 1983’s Let’s Dance, 1984’s Tonight and 1987’s Never Let Me Down – alongside a pair of first-time-on-vinyl live albums – Serious Moonlight (Live ’83) and Glass Spider (Live Montreal ’87) – and the newly assembled compilation Dance, which collects 12 contemporaneous remixes from the era.
