This Saturday (April 20), music fans and vinyl collectors across the world will be on the hunt for exclusive vinyl pressings on Record Store Day 2024, and I’m thrilled to be among those who are preparing for battle at my local record store.
At this year’s event, music database and marketplace Discogs is teaming up with Record Store Day for a post-event sale, extending the festivities for an extra day.
Record Store Day Afters will be a follow-up event to Record Store Day and will give music fans a second chance to pick up limited vinyl pressings if they miss out on the big day itself. Discogs will kick off its sale via its online Shopping Hub, which goes live on Monday April 22 at 12 noon PT / 3pm EST / 8pm BST / 5am on April 23 AEST, and will include retailers from the following countries:
- Australia
- Belgium
- Luxembourg
- The Netherlands
- Canada
- Finland
- Germany
- Austria
- Switzerland
- Ireland
- Japan
- Poland
- United Kingdom
The sale will not only give you another shot at getting your hands on exclusive LPs from the official Record Store Day list, but Discogs’ partnership with Record Store Day will allow you to shop retailers from around the world for region-specific releases. In the build-up to the post-event sale, Discogs will release more Record Store Day-focussed lists, along with guides to give you a clear idea of what albums are available and where you can get them.
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Discogs is truly pulling out all the stops to make sure you don’t miss out on the Record Store Day exclusives you've got your eye on, while at the same time connecting music fans to record stores around the world. But above all, the extended festivities build on the desire to improve the accessibility of music for everyone in the fandom.
A step towards equal music access
The vinyl revival has been on the slow rise since the mid-to-late 2000s, but didn’t really have an impact on music fans until the late 2010s (I started collecting vinyl records in 2017). There’s no denying that the demand for vinyl has skyrocketed in the 2020s – thank you Taylor Alison Swift – and now it’s rare to come across a music fan who doesn’t collect physical music.
Meanwhile, there’s been a surge in demand for live music events since the pandemic-induced concert droughts. Not even Swift herself could be prepared for the stampede of fans that swarmed Ticketmaster when tickets for her Eras Tour went on sale in November 2022.
Artists and promoters have sought to avoid a repeat of that fiasco, and since then artist and venue-exclusive pre-sales for tours have become integral to the ticket-buying process as a way to allow the fans to have first dibs – it worked in my favor when I was able to snap up tickets for Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour.
Discogs is looking to do something similar for fans of vinyl through its partnership with Record Store Day. It’s standard practice for record stores to have queues out the door on the day, and since there’s a limited number of pressings per LP, it becomes a competition and not a space for music fans to thrive.
Adding an extra day means that fans don’t have to worry about arriving at their local store with a competitive mindset, allowing people to enjoy the experience and feel the sense of community that comes with being a music fan. The demand for vinyl records is only going to grow, and who knows, maybe in a few years we’ll be celebrating Record Store Weekend instead.
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