Indie Record Stores Sold Over 2000% More Vinyl Than Usual on Record Store Day
Record Store Day has now passed. The unofficial holiday took place on Saturday, April 19th. The main goal of RSD is to boost independent record stores, so how did it do? Border City Media worked with Record Store Day to track sales with BuzzAngle Music, a new in-depth music analytics service. The service is supported by CIMS, DRS, AIMS, and the Music Business Association. Border City Media says BuzzAngle “provides web and mobile access that give a comprehensive view of music consumption through a series of reports and dashboards, which include analytics on the sales, streaming and airplay activity of albums, songs and artists. This can be further stratified by a multitude of filters, including a specific day/timeframe or a specific geography. Distributor and Label Dashboards will show market share by an individual or a combination of elements (sales, streaming, airplay, etc.) further filtered by timeframe, genre and geography.“
BuzzAngle can track sales on a daily basis. The company says that previously, industry sales could only be tracked on a weekly basis. They collected data from StreetPulse and new handheld scanners for these RSD stats. A dozen indie record stores that hadn’t previously reported to data pools used these scanners.
Border City Media’s Founder and CEO, Jim Lidestri, says:
“Data that can only show week-over-week activity and use estimates and extrapolations to size sales are not acceptable in the current marketplace. It makes it particularly difficult to measure the true impact of Record Store Day…”
The service is currently in beta, they expect a full launch at the end of Summer, 2014.
Now for the results…
RSD sales were compared with stats from the previous Saturday, which fell on April 12th:
Independent record stores had 646 percent more sales on Record Store Day. Vinyl sales at independent records stores were up 2,042 percent.
Vinyl accounted for 74 percent of all sales at these indie stores on RSD.
Overall, vinyl sales across the whole industry went up 1,855 percent.
Source: Digital Music News
