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Around this time last year, Smash! Records co-owner Matt Moffatt got a panicked call from a distributor. It was just days before Record Store Day—easily Smash! and all other local record stores’ busiest day of the year—and the distributor told him his biggest order wouldn’t be delivered in time.
“He asked if I could meet up several states away to pick up the order and I was like ‘No, I can’t do that.'” Moffatt recalls. “But I kind of wish that maybe I had, because it would’ve saved me a lot of grief.”
The situation worked out—the order was delivered on Record Store Day and Moffatt took down the names of people who had been looking for those particular records earlier to let them know they got them—but it’s just one story of many that’s causing small stores across the country to opt out of participating in Record Store Day.
In Richmond, Va., Vinyl Conflict—a small record store that specializes in punk, metal, hardcore, and indie music—announced that they wouldn’t be participating in Record Store Day this year, instead making April 18th “Customer Appreciation Day.”
“The spirit and ideals of this once innocently conceived holiday have been shifted by the winds of greed and driven into a sea of treachery, rife with dolphins of deceit,” owner Robert “Bobby” Conflict wrote. “This is no longer a celebration of the local shop where people can come together over their shared love of music.”
It doesn’t stop with Vinyl Conflict. All over, both record stores and small labels have expressed their discontent with what Record Store Day has become. Which brings up a depressing question: is it time for Record Store Day to die?
For many local stores, though, the situation isn’t as grim as much of what’s been written about Record Store Day would lead you believe.
“It’s one day when we can make a good amount of money and it brings people in who typically wouldn’t be here,” says Nat Brown, who works at Arlington’s CD Cellar. “That aspect is very good for us. But some customers come once a year, and that’s it. They buy what they’re going to buy and don’t come back.”
Those customers—the ones who line up ridiculously early to get their hands on whatever new, exclusive release the major distributors put out that year—are the ones that make Record Store Day worth the hassle for many local shops. Even if they only come by once a year, that one day is consistently the most lucrative day of the year for those stores.
Josh Harkavy, who owns Red Onion Records, says that his store makes more and more each year on Record Store Day. But Red Onion hasn’t ever really experienced any of the difficulties that Smash! or other stores across the country have dealt with.
“It really depends on how many distributors you deal with,” he says. “We don’t deal with too many, and then there are some we only deal with on Record Store Day, because there’s only a few distributors that carry everything. When we can order from a label, that’s the best way to do it.”
Record Store Day was founded in 2007 by some independent store owners and employees “as a way to celebrate and spread the word about the unique culture surrounding nearly 1400 independently owned record stores in the US and thousands of similar stores internationally.”
Each year, labels and distributors work together with Record Store Day to drum up excitement for exclusive titles—rereleases, live records, rare recordings, etc.—to be released for RSD. But for the record stores hoping to carry a lot of these releases, it’s a toss up as to how many copies of RSD releases they’ll get—or even if they’ll get them.
And each year, more and more titles are being released, so it’s hard for stores—especially local ones—to know what and how much to order. Last year, WAMU’s Bandwidth talked to some local record store owners who said they’re having trouble keeping up with the many RSD releases.
Most local record stores have learned not to make huge orders for Record Store Day. Smaller orders means less room for disappointment. Red Onion, Smash!, and CD Cellar all say they keep their RSD orders low and try not to rely on big distributors for orders, as opposed to a store like Crooked Beat, which is known for having one of the largest selections of RSD releases in the area each year. In fact, Crooked Beat’s RSD haul this year was so big that when I went in to speak to owner Bill Daly for this article, he was too busy unpacking and pricing records to talk.
But with many bemoaning Record Store Day as straying far from its original goals, most local store owners still think it’s a good thing.
“People tend to overreact [to Record Store Day] on either end of things,” says James Ritter, who co-owns Joint Custody Records on U Street. “At the end of the day there’s a lot of headaches, but there’s a lot of benefit. If you get someone that comes in and has a good experience at Record Store Day and they start checking out used records and come back, then that’s a good thing.”
And really, it’s only one day of the year to be worried about, Harkavy says. “if you’re a store depending on this one day to make money or stay in business, then something’s wrong.”
Though Record Store Day has grown up a lot since its inception eight years ago, it’s still, at its core, a celebration of music and independent businesses. Even if a store isn’t carrying all the hottest exclusive RSD releases, customers will still come out to support their local stores. And those stores will celebrate their customers, with in-store performances and other surprises.
Even after last year’s debacle Moffatt still has a pretty positive outlook on Record Store Day. Smash! is opening early, with free giveaways for the first people in line and refreshments for customers later in the day.
“I have no problems with people spreading the idea of listening to music,” he says. “It’s a big machine and we could sit hear all day long and nitpick at it, but the one good thing about it is that people are talking about music. About physical music that a store like mine benefits from.”
