We all love Record Store Day. Since launching in 2007, it’s become conventional wisdom that RSD is one of the most benevolent and wonderful days of the year. A day on which the little guy finally get his due, independent labels are at the forefront, and brick and mortar record stores reign supreme.
But for all the love surrounding Record Store Day, and we do love it, we actually don’t know a whole lot about it. Sure, we know it was launched to prop up ailing record stores and smaller labels, but how does it work? Can anyone issue an RSD release? Is someone watching over what each store and label is selling?
One thing we do know is that Record Store Day is incredibly influential, powerful even. It is often cited as being the primary driving force behind the “vinyl resurgence” and the one day is more profitable for independent record labels than the entire week before Christmas.
It’s that power that ensures every indie label on the planet wants to be involved. But as Stereogum reports, not every eager beaver is welcome to the Record Store Day party. In fact, the logistics involved in Record Store Day are surprisingly restrictive and even worse, bizarrely opaque.
Take, for example, Father/Daughter Records, a San Francisco-based record label who put out their first RSD release last year. The record in question was a compilation titled Faux Real, which featured smaller artists covering songs by fake bands from movies and TV shows.
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The label was hoping to follow up the release with another instalment this year and evens started work on it, assuming that it would once again be accepted by RSD organisers, but when they submitted it via their distributor, the album was rejected for not being “compelling enough”.
“Since I wasn’t involved in any of the talks with RSD, I can’t really speak to what they said other than what our distributor told us, which was: ‘They ran this past the panel again and they have decided to pass. Overall feedback was that the release was not compelling enough,'” recounts co-founder Jessi Frick.
“It’s basically like someone dumping you but not telling you why,” she adds. Indeed, the salt in this particular wound is that there’s no way for Frick to know why her compilation was rejected. According to Frick, “there isn’t criteria to follow” when it comes to putting together an RSD release.
“Just make it an interesting release that people will want to buy on this one day [is the only criteria]. I’ve seen repressings of records that no one cares about, limited to like 5k copies. That doesn’t feel special to me,” she explains.
What’s worse is that RSD organisers didn’t merely reject a proposed concept. According to Frick, as vinyl plants are overrun in the lead-up to the big day, “you want to get everything into production by like Thanksgiving”. This means “artwork, masters, details on the pressing” are all into a distributor by December.
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“So I guess they bring everything to them and RSD has a panel that goes over everything, and then chooses what to accept/reject for inclusion,” says Frick. While she’s still unclear as to why Faux Real was rejected, she speculates it has to do with “Soundscan numbers” due to a lack of proper promotion.
“I’m not talking badly about the stores at all, I know RSD is a crazy day and they do the best they can,” she says. “But I definitely think RSD is changing. I am all for the independent spirit of it but, kind of like SXSW, the major players have a bigger stake. Money talks. And the entire point of it all gets muddled.”
Frick isn’t the first label owner or fan to highlight the changing face of Record Store Day. As The 405 wrote last year, many label owners are concerned the event is now about two things: major labels releasing uninspired releases on wax to score a quick cash-grab, and ultra-rare box sets that are snapped up and sold on eBay for egregious sums.
“There are so many moving pieces to the whole thing. It’s hard to say if it’s just something that RSD needs to be doing to make the process helpful for real indie labels,” Frick says. “Transparency would definitely be helpful.”
“For one, I had to pay mechanicals on these songs, royalties to the original songwriters, and mastering, artwork, getting vinyl into production… Costs I fronted under the assumption that people don’t get rejected from participating. And for a label my size, run on my day job budget, it’s a big hit to take.”
