Record Store Day: The Most Improbable Comeback of the 21st Century by Larry Jaffee

“A complete and colourful book that needed to be written. Hats off to Larry Jaffee who stepped up to give us the definitive history of a phenomenon that, for all its crowds and mayhem, changed the course of independent music—saving not just thousands of stores, but easily as many indie labels. When it comes to Record Store Day, the Churchillian formulation surely applies: never have so many owed so much to so few. This story stands testament to what we’ve all seen and know to be true: when counter culture gets organised in clever ways, it can turn battles that once seemed so lost.” 

 

Record Store Day: the Most Improbable Comeback of the 21st Century provides the official inside story on how Record Store Day managed to revive the vinyl format from oblivion over the past fifteen years with some of the biggest artists jumping at the chance to support independent record stores. This alliance and renewed camaraderie between artists and record stores set in motion the world's largest annual music event: Record Store Day.

The voices of numerous artists, record store owners, and the creators of Record Store Day take the reader from this phenomenon’s shaky beginnings through the crisis of 2020, illustrating how record stores went from irrelevance to irrevocably changing the music industry forever.

Record Store Day is sure to appeal to record collectors who line up the night before in a quest to snare limited-edition collectibles on vinyl, while capturing the important role that independ-ent record stores play in their communities.