Five Reasons You Should Buy A Record On Record Store Day

Record Store Day 2016 is only a handful of days away, and the excitement levels are starting to peak.

If you're still umming and ahhing about whether to head along to one of your local independent record stores and part with some hard-earned cash in exchange for quality music, here are some hard-to-fault reasons to make the effort and support the industry...

1. Records are awesome

Listening to a good album through a computer or via compressed digital files is like trying to appreciate a fine painting through binoculars – you can do it, but you have to try super hard and sooner or later you’re going to get a headache.

2. It’s on a Saturday

As anyone who was raised before the advent of cyberspace will know Saturday is by far the best day of the week for record shopping. It’s the weekend already but for most the harbinger of the impending Monday morning is still a distant threat so time is your friend. And you need time on your side for proper record shopping.

3. Metallica are the official 2016 ambassadors

As anyone who’s seen Some Kind Of Monster will attest despite their loud music and rough exteriors they’re fragile souls deep down – if this year’s Record Store Day is a bust because of your apathy you may have blood on your hands. Metal blood.

4. You’ll stand out from the herd

Record Store Day is the day when a flood of exclusive and limited release issues are shipped only to independent record stores, not available anywhere else at all before or after that third Saturday in April. In this day and age where experience is sacrosanct and everyone’s out to one-up each other what could be better than lauding one of 10 worldwide copies of the new Flaming Lips single made from bugs and earwax over your friends and family?

5.You’ll be supporting your local indie record store, which makes you an awesome altruist

For a while there last decade, the march of time and its technological advancements, combined with corporate chains smelling blood trying to muscle in on the music sector, made it seem that record stores were an endangered species. Now as people are rediscovering the myriad joys of the tactile music listening experience indie record stores are popping back up all over the globe, and the world is once again becoming a better place. But we can’t be complacent, otherwise evil will surely triumph.

5A. There will most likely be beer and bands

I repeat, beer and bands. Two of the greatest things in life together as they’re meant to be? Priceless!

Record Store Day is this Saturday, 16 April.

Not only can Steve Bell not count to five but as co-owner of Brisbane’s newest indie store Sonic Sherpa, he has a massive conflict of interest in penning this piece (even in the indie realms commercial interests eventually override integrity).