By – Andrea Paschal

This weekend we will celebrate Record Store Day, a day where music lovers all over the world will gather at their favorite shops with the hopes of scoring their favorite RSD releases and maybe finding some other cool stuff along the way.

Record Store Day has become an international event, and in many households is a date that gets lovingly marked on the calendar with birthdays and other holidays. Last year, Taylor Swift was our first global ambassador. This was huge, because it brought out many people who before that had never visited a record store. While the special releases are great, the real essence of the day is about celebrating all the amazing record stores around the world, the impact they have on bringing a community together, and all the work they do (especially on this day) to bring cool and exciting music to their customers. That is in fact the very reason the day was created.  

I run the Coalition of Independent Music Stores (one of the co- founders of RSD) and ThinkIndie Distribution, and back in 2007, when Record Store Day was created, it was done by our Coalition along with our two other partners- the Department of Record Stores and the Alliance of Records Stores. So many of us were tired of defending our stores when we would hear the average person say “wow… do record stores even still exist?” So, we all worked together and started to brainstorm a way to really bring awareness to these stores across the country (and now the globe!) and to show “Yeah, they really do exist!”

With that, Record Store Day was born. The first year (2008) was small with only 10 releases, thanks to Metallica, and some of our friends at labels and distribution that believed in what we were trying to do. This year we will celebrate our 16^th Record Store Day event with a great list of special releases you can only get at your independent record store. Beyond Record Store Day (the day), we are also an organization that works to advocate for indie stores every day of the year because we really do believe that EVERY day should be record store day.

So I hope you have lots of fun and end up with lots of great new music. Just keep in mind that we are also celebrating and giving back to all the record stores that have been the starting point for so many of our musical journeys.

Happy Record Store Day!

Andrea Paschal is the Executive Director of ThinkIndie Distribution and the Coalition of Independent Music Stores, a nationwide organization of independently owned record stores and one of the co-founders of Record Store Day. 

See what Birmigham’s own SEASICK RECORDS has in store for RSD 2023 and see their staff picks!  Click Here