By Paul de Barros, The Seattle Times
The truth is that people who run record stores are in it for love as much as money.
"I've been doing this since I was in college," said Kuzma. "I'm not making what I was 10 years ago. Those days are over. But it's what I do. Once this goes away, I don't know."
It does seem likely that it will go away. Though rumors of the CD's demise are premature, with the rise of streaming and "the cloud" — accessing music online from a digital pool — the format is probably doomed. What will happen to record stores then?
"The general thought is that there's enough used product out there that a store can make it on used for the next five to 10 years," said Batt.
Record Store Day: A Brief Financial History
By Zack O'Malley Greenburg, Forbes
“Even if the labels went crazy and added $10 to the price [of each record], it wouldn’t matter,” he explains. “It’s so little money.”
It might not stay that way for long—Record Store Day is just starting to catch on in Europe, Japan and elsewhere.
“The growth is going to be there for some time,” says Kurtz. “It’s just at the beginning of its life.”
Get out there and buy vinyl: It’s Record Store Day
By Dan DeLuca, Inquirer Music Critic
There’ll be CDs and all sorts of other items on sale, too, at Record Store Day shops — like a Buck Owens coloring book I’ve got my eye on. But a lot of what Record Store Day is about is vinyl, which, in the age of MP3s and streaming music, has become the lifeblood of many indie shops as CDs become superfluous and music geeks young and old yearn for tangible product and analog sound.
It’s more than a fad: Sure, vinyl still accounts for only 1.2 percent of total sales but, according to Nielsen SoundScan, vinyl sales were up 39 percent last year, on top of 10 percent growth from 2010. Record Store Day is a communal focal point of that surge. So if you’re one of those people who get all tingly when watching a 180-gram disc of vinyl spin around a turntable at 33? revolutions per minute, get out there and buy something.