#recordstoreday

3 weeks ago I spent a few hours with photoshop working on the Story Bird logo that Linda made a while ago to make it suitable for print. 2 weeks ago I spent a few hours researching the best way to convert the 24 bit 48 Khz Story Bird mixes to 16 bit 44.1 Khz audio files that could be burned to CD. A week ago I went to Maplins in Tottenham Court Road, bought a cake of printable CD-Rs, dusted off my old MacBook Pro and spent the weekend burning copies of the Story Bird album. Tomorrow the CDs will go on sale at The Marwood Coffee Shop in Brighton for #recordstoreday.

The whole process felt fun, quaint, cute, anachronistic, nostalgic, and absurd. The last time I burned CDs was 3 years ago, when I made a few copies of the 100 Robots Sustain album for friends. My current MacBook Pro doesn’t have an optical drive, let alone a CD writer. The CD player in our living room doesn’t work. I ripped our CD collection to MP3 a decade ago when we still lived in Nottingham and needed to make space for our new family. Until I tested the Story Bird CDs, the last 2 operational CD players in our house haven’t played a CD in months. It’s great to see real, physical copies of the album I’ve spent the last 6 months working on, the CDs sound great and the unique hand printed covers look amazing, but as with the piles of vinyl records sold tomorrow on #recordstoreday they will mostly serve as limited edition souvenirs.

#recordstoreday promotes collecting records just as the #comicbookday that inspired it promotes collecting comics. Fetishising obsolete formats is harmless fun, but discovering new music and supporting musicians is important. On the 23rd of April, once you’ve filed away the limited edition vinyl you queued overnight to buy on #recordstoreday, spend some time in the comfort of your own home downloading some amazing music on #bandcampday.