For the annual Record Store Day celebration, the blowhards from Chicago’s two Right Wing newspapers (aka Sound Opinions on NPR) interviewed three store owners. One was John Kunz of Waterloo Records, the man behind the best damned new music store in Austin. During the episode there was the usual discussion about the death of the CD at SXSW, the constant dirge I hear like almost as often as newspapers. There was a good piece of news from Mr. Kunz. In May the independent record stores would be banding together to have their own download store like iTunes or Amazon except it would have content exclusive to them. I almost forgot about it until recently. Tonight I had more time to dig around it. A very eclectic assortment of albums by genre, styles and most importantly…age, as in things which have been out of print for some years. Even if I can’t pique your interest, I think I can entice you by all the free stuff to check out. I scored about a half dozen things to investigate along with a funny single I bought. Now I don’t feel guilty because Somara and I are going down there tomorrow night after work. She gets to spend her $20 gift card across the street with Book People while I pick up the new Cracker, St. Vincent, the Smithereens tribute to Tommy and probably an impulse buy or two. Hey, I need to get plenty of material for all those podcasts I promised to make for my friends, namely the new music show Mark and I want to do, that’s the big one.
So click on this link since there’s nothing to lose other than time. I believe that this can co-exist with iTunes, Amazon and physical copies of music.