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Record store owners lament the move to New Music Friday

 
Manny Matalon, manager of Daddy Kool Records in St. Petersburg, unpacks new inventory for Record Store Day in 2012. Though digital music sales eclipsed physical music for the first time last year, Matalon says CDs and vinyl aren’t as dead as people think.
Manny Matalon, manager of Daddy Kool Records in St. Petersburg, unpacks new inventory for Record Store Day in 2012. Though digital music sales eclipsed physical music for the first time last year, Matalon says CDs and vinyl aren’t as dead as people think.
Published July 2, 2015

If you're itching to get your hands on this week's new albums by Owl City, Ghostface Killah or Veruca Salt, don't bother hitting your local record shop on Tuesday.

Starting this week, the music industry is adopting a new timetable for releasing music in America. As part of a push to standardize record release dates around the globe, you'll have to wait a few more days to fill up your latest playlist or cradle that new CD or LP in your arms.

Say goodbye to New Music Tuesdays, and hello to New Music Fridays.

It's the latest move in the industry's ceaseless scramble to keep up with changing times. In 2014, digital music sales eclipsed physical music sales for the first time — $6.85 billion to $6.82 billion — according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a Swiss body that represents more than 1,300 record companies around the world.

Moving new release day from Tuesday to Friday, the federation argues, will minimize the risk of album leaks and illegal downloads. For years, new music has been released on different days in different countries — Mondays in France and the United Kingdom, Tuesdays in the United States and Canada, Fridays in Germany and Australia. Once an album is online, it can spread instantly.

From a digital perspective, the move makes sense. But out in the physical world, it's a different story.

While larger retailers, such as Target, have publicly supported the concept of a global release day, smaller stores wish that day was still Tuesday.

"A global street date doesn't sound like it's really that bad of an idea," said Manny Matalon, manager of Daddy Kool Records in St. Petersburg. "It's just the day."

Daddy Kool belongs to an organization called the Alliance of Independent Media Stores, which protested the move at a recent music industry convention in Nashville. New Music Tuesdays, they argued, still bring people into midsized stores, particularly on slower foot-traffic days early in the week.

Moreover, if a shop sold out of a new release on Tuesday, it could always order additional inventory by the weekend. But if a new album sells out on a Friday, those shelves might have to sit empty until the next week. And what if a new-release shipment arrives a day or two late?

"I don't understand why they couldn't have just said, 'Let's all do Tuesday' or 'Let's all do Monday,' " said Keith Ulrey, owner of the Seminole Heights record shop Microgroove. "It's like you're slamming all your traffic to the weekend, and then you've got five days of just sitting there."

Do those five days really make a difference? Ulrey said they do. New albums are a relatively small part of Microgroove's operation, but Ulrey used to work at Vinyl Fever, a Tampa institution that went out of business in 2011. Until its closing, Ulrey said, Vinyl Fever drew Tuesday regulars.

"Here we were relying on Tuesdays to get us a bump to the end of the week," he said. "If they had moved it from Tuesdays to Fridays, Vinyl Fever would have closed months earlier."

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• • •

Dan Briggs is the sort of customer helping keep old-school record stores afloat.

"I'm the oddball," he said. "I still buy tons of vinyl, and I still buy CDs. I occasionally buy cassettes still. Old formats die hard with me."

Briggs plays bass in the progressive metal group Between the Buried and Me, whose seventh album Coma Ecliptic is among the first crop of new albums being released on Friday.

The North Carolina band is launching a North American tour on Tuesday — the same day they initially thought they'd be releasing their new album. When Coma Ecliptic finally comes out, they'll be in Fort Lauderdale. And Briggs will try to find a local shop that has it in stock.

"It's always so fun to see it in the store," he said, "and feel like you're out there with everyone else, trying to get the record going."

Still, Briggs calls album sales essentially "trivial" when it comes to funding the band's bottom line.

"All we've done for over 10 years is just tour," Briggs said. "That's how we make a living."

So are albums — and the brick-and-mortar stores that carry them — really, truly, finally on the way out?

Well, most mall music stores like FYE are long gone, and many independent retailers like Vinyl Fever have closed. But there are rays of hope. While digital and streaming music consumption may be leaving physical media in the dust, CDs and vinyl records still accounted for more than 58 percent of all album sales in 2014, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Some segments of the marketplace may see no impact from the Tuesday-Friday switch. Take used music. The Sound Exchange in Tampa, Brandon and Pinellas Park makes more money from used CDs and vinyl than from anything new. One week in June, the chain saw about 3,400 used titles circulate into its stacks.

"That's a lot, and that's pretty typical," said marketing director and vinyl buyer Erin Stoy. "New releases are something we've always carried and will continue to carry, but it's not going to determine the success of our business."

Vinyl records, too, are in the midst of a resurgence. New vinyl sales rose 52 percent to 9.2 million units in 2014, the ninth straight year-over-year increase and the highest total since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking vinyl sales in 1991. More than half of those vinyl LPs were purchased at independent shops.

The vinyl renaissance comes with its own set of problems, though. Unlike new CDs, unsold vinyl albums cannot be returned to labels. New vinyl that doesn't move right away — like the limited releases that hit shelves each April for Record Store Day, an international celebration of indie record shops — can linger in stores for months.

In March, Ulrey ordered 10 new vinyl copies of Death Cab For Cutie's Kintsugi, an album that debuted in Billboard's weekly Top 10.

"Ten years ago, I would have sold all 10 copies of that LP that Tuesday," he said. "I'm still sitting on four of them. I don't think that's indicative of how good or bad the album is. That's just a little proof of how few people are really buying vinyl as opposed to downloading it or getting it from some other source."

Record Store Day organizers have announced plans for an initiative dubbed "Vinyl Tuesday," in which some new and limited vinyl albums will continue to hit shelves on Tuesday. It is not, they insist, a weekly version of Record Store Day, but rather one more reason to keep passionate record-buyers coming in early.

In the meantime, record shops will do their best with New Music Fridays, and continue reminding music fans that physical media, as Matalon puts it, "isn't as dead as everyone wants to proclaim it to be." He pointed to a release day in May when Daddy Kool saw a run on pop duo Twenty One Pilots' new album Blurryface.

"I've got like half a dozen, I sell one or two during the day, everything is kind of normal," he said. "Then school lets out. Now it's about 4:30, 5 o'clock, and three kids come in — boom-boom-boom. I'm basically sold out."

You read that right: Teenagers actually rushed a record store to snap up a hot new album. On CD. In 2015.

Contact Jay Cridlin at cridlin@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8336. Follow @JayCridlin.