With the announcement of this year’s list of exclusive limited-edition releases, Record Store Day is as divisive as ever: a heavily oversaturated and predominantly bland collection of kitsch, novelty and album campaign box-ticking. There are a few special and weird items buried among the 500 releases on offer, but not much worth writing home about, let alone worth queuing for at 6am. This year’s list will receive something between apathy, complete indifference and groans of despair at the roll call of Shaggy, Belinda Carlisle and Jake Bugg’s take on Wichita Lineman. It makes you wonder whether the whole thing needs a shot in the arm or to the back of the head.
The event was created in 2007 with the aim of celebrating the culture, enthusiasts and community behind record shops, and to drive people into stores during those fallow spring months. To be clear: Record Store Day is also about making money, and as a retailer it’d be pretty disingenuous to make out like I hate the event. It’s the one time of year where people queue up outside our premises and manically shop with seemingly little to no regard to the impending total cost.
So why, then, is there such a burgeoning rift between passionate music supporters like me, and this annual delivery of increasingly deranged fetish objects? The big problem with the vinyl resurgence is this bizarre effort to derail its legitimacy with gimmicky releases. It seems contradictory to present the day as your chance to go out and connect with a record shop, and to then release titles that are screamingly discordant with what the shops stock every other day of the year.
Source:
theguardian
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