URBAN VINYL STORE FREE

Comprised of second-hand records – all priced at £5 – the idea here is that you rifle through the stock and take your pick. There’s also an uncurated section of Urban Outfitters – and actually that’s even better. But, of course, that part of me is a selfish, unpleasant snob and this is no less than he deserves – not least because Spiderland wouldn’t have made it into the racks of that shop if there wasn’t a breathtaking piece of work around which to build a myth.īut it’s not just about the new albums. Of course, there’s a part of me that slightly resents the fact that Slint’s Spiderland – an album I bought shortly after it came out – has now had such a myth built around it that Urban Outfitters stock it. That’s great news for me (a year previously, I wouldn’t have got much change from £100 for a second-hand copy) and also vindication for enthusiast-run US imprint Light in the Attic, who went to the trouble of licensing it for reissue. Before happening upon it at an Urban Outfitters, I had no idea that D’Angelo’s Voodoo had attained a vinyl repress. The store’s buying power means albums that were previously hard to obtain on vinyl can now be purchased with ease. It might not be to everyone’s taste, but someone somewhere at the company is making a conscious choice that will partly be predicated on aesthetic criteria. Any record retailer that doesn’t simply stock the top 10 albums is, in one sense or another, curating their stock.

URBAN VINYL STORE FREE

I’ve got about 20,000 records in my collection: from what Jake Bugg would no doubt call “manufactured crap” to free jazz albums which, to the untrained ear, sound like Sweep having a fatal asthma attack. This is, to use a technical term, arrant horseshit. When you look through a stack of records in the store, you’re essentially looking at the vinyl equivalent of an Amazon experience.” The London-based style bible – which until this point hasn’t been well-known for representing the interests of those who would hitch 70 miles at 4am on Record Store Day in order to queue for a nine-inch Olivia Tremor Control picture disc of which only 217 have been pressed – declared that buying a record from Urban Outfitters is an entirely different experience from buying one elsewhere: “You get the opposite experience of what you’d get in an independent music store, which offers a more personalised and curated selection. “Urban Outfitters doesn’t just make money off selling offensive sweatshirts and smiley face crop tops to your little sister for V festival,” fulminated Dazed & Confused. In some quarters, this constitutes a pyrrhic victory for the format that refuses to die. Not only is Urban Outfitters the largest global vinyl stockist, it’s the only one. But, of course, notwithstanding the presence of a Rough Trade store in Brooklyn, there are no international music retailers.

Like many people, when I read the claim that Urban Outfitters is now the world’s largest stockist of vinyl albums, I had to conduct a quick mental audit of all the other global stockists of vinyl in order to swiftly come to the conclusion that this couldn’t possibly be true.

Urban vinyl store