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Thoughts on Record Store Day • James Campion Record Store Day has turned into craziness ...

The most recent bi-annual Record Store Day (RSD) has passed, and it got me thinking: Is this still a good thing? I mean, it was absolutely a fantastic idea almost twenty years ago. But, sadly, like all great ideas that devolve into something lesser – sometimes seedy, mostly commercialized and then just maudlin – this has gone off the rails.

The original intent of Record Store Day was much needed and brought welcomed attention to independent record stores across America, then the world. Artists, labels, collectors, and vendors banded together to create a happening that would boost support for this crucial and oft-overlooked element of the music business that had been marginalized over the years by large chains and then streaming services. This is still an important off shoot of the event. But let’s call it as it is, it is an ancillary aspect now. Record Store Day has turned into craziness. Not that is bad craziness, but maybe it is? That’s what I hope to get into here.
     
Let’s get this out of the way, I’m a Vinyl Head. Have been since the very early 1970s. Built, and kept building, a record collection that I dragged around through my itinerant teens into my 20s through my 30s, even when I no longer had a turntable (thanx to my lovely bride I got a really good one in my 40s). I kept collecting long after they stopped making records. I worked at Record World in the mid-1980s and watched in abject melancholia as the CD put my beloved obsession to bed for what I thought was forever. Then, sometime in the early aughts vinyl came back – first in the hipster underground, which caused a stir. Word got out that with streaming run amok, young people warmed to the idea of owning hard copies of music. Plus, as I’d argued for decades, people were finally admitting that records sounded warmer than digitally constructed sounds. Shit, I could even begin filling out my pile of CD-only releases that were being pressed into vinyl!       

Record Store Day seemed like a victory lap of this period. New collectors and geek afficionados were creating a tribe to rescue the dying record store industry. But, as human nature goes, its growth into a national sensation of long lines and high prices, singular “collectable” releases and rip-off after-market sales drained the life from it.

Sure, part of my angst about RSD has to do with my fringe interest jumping to the center of the universe and then being overwhelmed by gluttonous opportunists trying to cash in on a movement. It’s petty, I know. This mania is still “helping” record stores, right? But even those who still get into RSD must agree that what has transpired was not in the plan. 
     
Established in 2008 in Baltimore, Maryland to “celebrate the culture of the independently owned record store” RSD is held on a Saturday every April and every Black Friday in November. The event originated in the United States and has expanded internationally, with official organizers in the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, Mexico, Europe, Japan, and Australia. The excitement begins a day before, as collectors line up and sleep on the cold pavement overnight to get in early and snatch up the one-off releases, newly figured versions, and others in multi-colored vinyl with special inserts, and blah blah blah. Sleeping in the freezing cold is crazy enough, but when almost half of those people are either exploiters of the system or paid gophers for resellers, it is killing the spirit of the most endearing aspect of RSD: actual Vinyl Heads securing the items they cherish. 
     
And for me that is the worst: packing the bulging lines to get in to purchase one-off vinyl gems for resellers, who end up hording the merchandise to sell it at exorbitant prices online later. For instance, a normal RSD release might be $50, but with only a couple of thousand available – snatched up by the crazies who sleep on the cold pavement – they end up on Ebay or Discogs the following day for $300 or more. Many of these people, as stated, are representing or in many cases are paid to circumvent the operation for profit. 
     
Another hidden faux pas of RSD is the big labels either flooding the market with special one-off releases from established artists like the Rolling Stones or Taylor Swift, leaving less space for independent or smaller label artists, which used to be the life’s blood of the event. Many of the smaller record stores are left out of these releases, or some of them are forced to buy more than they can move and then are stuck with inventory they are obliged to mark down. For the larger labels, this is pure marketing with nary a care about the event, beyond having a captive audience to secure their product or fear being left out, which, as mentioned, many stores are. 
     
Also, only two days a year doesn’t necessarily help record stores that only see business for a few days around that time – and one of those days is Black Friday, which in theory would already have guaranteed escalated foot traffic. If they want RSD to actually keep these businesses humming, they’d have it every other month. This way some months the big labels can dominate the party and others would be for the rest of the field. 
     
And finally, what about the music? Getting something – collectable or not – on vinyl to listen to it, enjoy it, and continue to enjoy it should be the goal here. Not to keep it in plastic for a decade and watch the prices rise. This is not real estate, it’s music. And RSD was supposed to celebrate that and not the items, the buzz, the profit. 
     
Record Store Day should remain in spirit and comportment a celebration of record collectors and independent sellers, but it should not forget these are artifacts of music, a music delivery device, a “record” of an event, as my old friend Ani DiFranco once coined it, not “the event!” And, okay, the world isn’t fair, but if we know there are these issues with RSD, couldn’t there be some honest discussion on how to make it fairer or less unfair? Or at least less nuts. 
  
© James Campion 4.26.25
     
Follow at https://www.facebook.com/jamesbartolommeocampion/ X (@FearNoArt) and Instagram (@jamescampion).
 
James Campion is the the author of “Deep Tank Jersey”, “Fear No Art”, “Trailing Jesus”, "Midnight For Cinderella" and “Y”. +, “Shout It Out Loud – The Story of KISS’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon” + “Accidently Like a Martyr – The Tortured Art of Warren Zevon” and “Take a Sad Song…The Emotional Currency of “Hey Jude" and coming in *April 2025, “Revolution – Prince, the Band, the Era.”

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