PHOTOS BY JASON E. KAPLAN Between 2002 and 2007, the number of record stores went from 7,500 in the country down to 1,800. The media had pretty much painted two pictures: either record stores were gone or record stores were going to be gone. I’d started a coalition in 1995 to have non-competitive record stores in cities across the United States that might share ideas with each other to make them stronger. It was out of a protest I did in 1993 against the industry, when the major distributors said they wouldn’t provide any marketing support to record stores that sold used records. Later that year, Garth Brooks made a statement that he didn’t want his new record sold in any store that sold used CDs. We invited the community to come and put their Garth Brooks products on our grill. We took it on the road — the Barbecue for Retail Freedom — and got on local news stations all over the country and in People magazine. Eventually the big distribution companies rescinded their policies and everything went back to normal. But that was the germination for me, coming up with the Coalition of Independent Music Stores. In ’94 I wrote up a proposal for this coalition to exist. Two other coalitions formed — one was for small niche stores and one was for three- to five-store chains — and in 2007, the three coalitions got together and talked about this idea that Chris Brown from Bull Moose Music up in New England had. He said we should do something like Free Comic Book Day, because comic book stores had a special day every year where they gave out some kind of free comics that the comic manufacturers would make. So we came up with this thing called Record Store Day. We went to the record industry and said, “Could you give us some compelling music on vinyl for this special day?” Because most of the majors weren’t making any vinyl at all at that time — it was an all-CD industry — and at that time, they were supporting their bigger accounts, the Walmarts and Best Buys and Towers. They go, “Oh, we can give the independent stories a bone. None of these other places will care if we give them vinyl, because they don’t carry vinyl.” And that first Record Store Day, we got 50 titles. That was in April of 2008. We hired a national press person to tell two stories. One was: Record stores aren’t gone; there are still 1,800 left*. The other was: Hey, they also carry records. If you look on a graph, at that point in time, new vinyl was probably less than a quarter of 1% of the business. There were some independent labels that would make some vinyl, but that was the beginning of the renaissance of vinyl. Who would have figured that vinyl would go from being a dead format to being, in physical record stores, the largest form? Although we still sell a lot of CDs — we’ve never given up on CDs. Something interesting happened during the COVID time. In particular, there was a lot of family bonding, because people couldn’t go out into the world. Kids hung out with their parents instead of their friends. Kids hung out with their grandparents. A lot of grandparents and parents became very cool. “Oh, you got a record player in the basement? Oh, you got a couple boxes of records in there? Can I go through them?” We started seeing parents coming in the store with their kids. We saw grandparents coming in with their kids. We saw all three generations coming in the store together. The youth market has come back, and they have really started a resurgence of physical-goods business. There’s nothing like seeing four 15-, 16-yearold girls in the store on a Saturday, each buying a record. And if you talk to them, they’re going over to one of their houses, and they’re all going to listen to those four records that afternoon. Streaming is still a big part of their life, but streaming is like radio was in the 1970s for me; they will listen to it, and if something really perks their ears and they start becoming attached to that artist, they want to have some ownership in that. Kids are coming in buying contemporary things — they’re buying Charli xcx, Clairo, Taylor Swift, you name it. But they’re also buying records from 40 or 50 years ago — the Grateful Dead, AC/DC, the Beatles, Fleetwood Mac — which, if I put it in perspective, when I started buying records in ’72, that would be like buying records from the ’20s and ’30s. None of my friends bought records from the ’20s and ’30s. I would buy an occasional record in there because I wanted to know about these things, but you just never saw that at all. In 2007 I was thinking, “What would this be in the future?” The kids are making it a reality that record stores are going into the future. *Since 2007, the number of independent record stores operating in the United States has swelled to 3,000, according to Currier. Customers thronged Music Millennium on Record Store Day 2025. Music Millennium on East Burnside Street in Portland 47
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