Record Store Day 2010

I was out of town last weekend camping, so I missed most of Record Store Day. But I did manage to get home for the Liam Hayes performance at Reckless Records here in Chicago which was great. Unfortunately, though, I missed out on most of the sweet RSD exclusives. I was able to pick up the Heart Of Gold/Sugar Mountain 7″, but missed out on the John Fahey LP reissue (only 500 copies pressed! c’mon guys!) But it seemed like there are more and more people combing through the racks of LPs, even on non-RSD weekends.

On Twitter yesterday, there were a bunch of folks pointing to numbers that emerged regarding sales per format and how well this RSD did.

From Billboard:

According to Street Pulse, comparing Record Store Day 2010 to RSD 2009 showed an increase of overall sales by 135.4%.

Here was their breakdown:
All Music + 135.4%
Vinyl + 376.7%
CD + 40.4%
Video – 38.6%
Merch + 28.5%

Also, and this is an interesting fact, according to Nielsen Soundscan, Record Store Day 2010 was the biggest day of sales for vinyl in Soundscan’s history. This is definitely good news for vinyl record, and turntable, manufacturers.

Couldn’t be happier about the bolded text. Maybe with more buyers, new LP costs will start coming down a bit. And maybe GLM might even jump into that marketplace.

So congrats to everyone who was involved for delivering on what should be, in my view, a major national holiday… or simply an everyday holiday.