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Noisey

Does Anyone Still Give a Shit About Record Store Day?

Has it been ruined by major label releases and weasels flipping everything on eBay or is it still "Christmas" for music fans? We asked the people of Sheffield.

Record Store Day, like most things in life, began with pure and good intentions. But as soon as signs of success started to show it was pounced upon by people with loads of money who then proceeded to ruin it for those who don't.

In the early years, heads would queue for hours outside shops in the hope of snagging a limited-edition run of some lost Sun Ra nugget that a label had lovingly restored. Then, year by year, major labels began to fill the release schedule with mindless reissues, re-releases and novelty records, often for twice as much as a regular release just because it was blue. Thus driving up the year-round cost of what becomes acceptable to pay for music because collectors simply must have a picture disc of Fawlty Towers (literally just audio from two episodes) or the re-release of Now That's What I Call Music or a glow-in-the-dark Ghostbusters single or this year's extremely on-the-nose release of Toto's "Africa" with the vinyl shaped like the continent of Africa.

Then throw in the hopeful eBayers who get there only to immediately list stuff for re-sale and you have a day that now seems to amount to little more than rampant consumerism fuelled by opportunism. It's basically a Black Friday scrum with all the discounted TVs replaced by Peter Hook's discography.

This week Jason Pierce and Pete Kember (AKA Sonic Boom) of space-rock pioneers Spacemen 3 put out a joint statement on Spiritualized's Facebook page, pleading with fans not to buy the Spacemen 3 records that were being released on RSD due to them having no part in them. To put this into context, the last time Pierce and Kember publicly put their name to anything together was 1995's Recurring, Spacemen 3's last album, which was recorded with such seething animosity between them that they refused to write together, play together, record together and when the record came out, even have their songs appear on the same side as one another. They ended up splitting the record down the middle, having a side each. For them to release a joint statement against this is testament to how pissed they must be. Likewise Simon Raymonde, head of Bella Union Records and ex-Cocteau Twins member, initially seemed to find out about his old band's RSD releases when the general public did (he's since taken down his Facebook post in which he said he knew nothing about the release and acknowledged "permissions for the reissue were obtained" after Universal Music reps gave a statement).

On top of all of this it has now long been argued that RSD is detrimental to smaller independent labels and artists because the sheer mass of releases that major labels are putting out for RSD are getting prioritised and clogging up the printing presses for months at a time, effectively meaning small labels aren't able to put out releases for chunks of the year – creating an obvious knock-on effect. Perhaps the most vocal opponent of RSD has been the Sonic Cathedral label, which last year likened major labels to "who is twisting the knife" as far as Record Store Day's perceived slow death is concerned. In 2016 even record shops themselves began to speak out against it with Phil Harding, boss of Blackcat Records in Taunton, arguing in The Quietus that, "RSD needs to come to an end" suggesting, amongst many other things, it is creating a deeply volatile and unstable model for shops to exist around.

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