To Nick Shelton, Record Store Day is The Sound Garden’s Black Friday.
Unlike a Black Friday event, however, Shelton said the event fosters a sense of community amongst music lovers—no one’s getting into any fights in the store.
“It’s awesome because everyone’s in a good mood, everyone’s excited,” he said.
Shelton, the general manager of The Sound Garden Syracuse, has been with the store for 13 years, about as long as Record Store Day has existed. This year’s event will take place on April 22.
Record Store Day is an annual, global event intended to support independent record stores. They partner with record labels and artists to press limited, special releases sold only in participating stores. This year’s list includes 301 titles, and over 1,400 stores globally will participate.
“The idea was to encourage people to come into an independent record store to buy records instead of buying online, to get them into a brick and mortar store and get them excited about it,” Shelton said.
The event usually draws around 400 to 500 customers to the store throughout the day, Shelton said. They hand out numbered tickets beforehand to customers who wish to come early in order to avoid a line from getting to out-of-hand.
“A lot of the people we see on Record Store Day are our regulars, but we get a lot of people coming from out of town, especially if they’re in an area where there isn’t a store that participates.”
After a noticeable increase in vinyl interest among young listeners around 2014, large online sellers like Urban Outfitters and Amazon began to draw sales away from independent record stores.
Shelton said he noticed an increase in participation in Record Store Day after the mid-2010s, when “a first” vinyl boom occurred. A lot of people also took an interest in vinyl during the pandemic, he said, and stuck with their interest even after quarantine ended.
The biggest challenge during Record Store Day is managing the high volume of customers. Sometimes the store will receive less of what they ordered, or they’ll underestimate how popular a record would be.
The participating stores play a big part in suggesting what the list will be for each year, Shelton said. These exclusive titles usually include live recordings, reissues or rare vinyl. Some anticipated releases this year include a live album from The 1975 and Taylor Swift’s “Folklore: the long pond studio sessions” EP.
During an annual meeting in Baltimore, the Department of Record Stores decided to establish record store day in 2007, when vinyl was just starting to make a comeback.
Buffalo native Brian Burkert opened the first Sound Garden in Baltimore 30 years ago. About five years later, he decided to open a store closer to home, and found Syracuse was in need of a record shop.
Now, The Sound Garden, located on Jefferson Street, is a staple for the Syracuse community.
“Every year there’s new people coming into the city, we try to find different ways to reach out to them,” Shelton said.
The Syracuse community constitutes the majority of the store’s customer-base, which includes a lot of college students, Shelton said.
As another means to attract vinyl lovers, Sound Garden occasionally hosts listening parties, which were frequent events in the 90s and early 2000s, before the practice sort of fell out. But more artists, like Paramore, are trying to bring them back, Shelton said. The Sound Garden has held six listening parties, including one for Paramore’s album “This is Why” last month.
These listening parties are another way to get people into the store, rather than shopping for their favorite music online or listening to it digitally. Marketing for Record Store Day occurs throughout the year just to raise awareness and encourage vinyl lovers to support small, local businesses.
Shelton is most looking forward to the “general attitude” of the day. He said he loves chatting with customers throughout the day about the vinyls they’re most excited about.
“It’s one of the days of the year where it feels like, ‘Ah, this is why we do this,’” he said.
