A continuación os dejamos este interesante post publicado en Create Digital Music sobre el «Día de las Tiendas de Discos»…

If Record Store Day is Dead, Maybe We Can Celebrate Music

Record Store Day has come and gone over the weekend. But 2015 will surely be remembered as a year in which Record Store Day did less to increase the visibility of vinyl records so much as to increase the visibility of how much everyone has grown to hate Record Store Day. And that seems it’s time for a post mortem – and a call to action.

I watched closely the reports from this weekend, just to see if there was anything positive – and there was. For every Foo Fighters (Grohl was this year’s ambassador, weirdly), there’s something with more worth to lesser-known music, like a 12? for Kiasmos on Erased Tapes. And clearly there are some shops that are glad to have an extra excuse to bring people into a store.

No doubt, too, there was a time when Record Store Day served a purpose – one it may have simply outgrown, as records have moved from curiosity back to norm.

But it’s clear that Record Store Day organizers aren’t just setting out to create a fun holiday for vinyl records. (Compare, again on Erased Tapes, Nils Frahm’s more innocent “Piano Day.”)

The Case Against Record Store Day

The entire focus of the “holiday” is on exclusive releases. It’s straight at the top of the official website. The entire focus is exclusive releases on the day and limited runs.

In fact, it’s also clear that Record Store Day is by definition a celebration of inanimate discs and the celebration of spending money. (To quote Douglas Adams, “Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”)

Yes, in fact, musicians and producers, the people producing the sounds on those inanimate discs, are a side show, a kind of incidental means of drawing your attention to buying some limited 12?.

From there, the litany of complaints continue:

• It’s just one day, ignoring the rest of the year.
• It actually trains customers to ignore the rest of the year.
• Collectibles benefit the after market more than the stores, as those records show up on eBay.
• It makes it harder to actually acquire and listen to music. (What? Listen? Why would you want to do that?)
• Big labels and big releases have crowded out the independent music that was supposed to be the point (though, again, Record Store Day are apparently vinyl fetishists, not music lovers, judging by their own site).
• It increasingly spotlights celebrities and recognizable music.

Basically, it pretends to be Earth Day for independent music, but it’s really just the musical equivalent of the Black Friday sale at your local Wal-Mart, thinly-disguised and complete with long queues.

And the most serious complaint, the one that has made so many independent labels turn recently on the holiday, is that vinyl pressing plants are now clogged for this one holiday – increasingly with top-of-the-charts mainstream music, not indies. That more or less ruins the entire year’s release calendar. It screws over emerging artists, because they have to squeeze into a more-crowded, more-delayed calendar rather than get music out quickly. Sometimes plants don’t even deliver.

Oh, yeah, and even distributors are now overcrowded, too, and focusing on bigger stores.

So maybe keep Record Store Day and ditch the exclusives? To be clear (and responding to comments below), the idea here may be that killing exclusive releases and the resulting bottleneck is the solution. Then again, I’m not convinced that there’s an easy way to do that when the whole day has been built around the notion of going to the shops for records not available on other days.

Hence the complaints have come not from vinyl naysayers, but from people committed to independent record shops and vinyl music distribution – the concern being that the holiday is ruining the very institutions it was ostensibly meant to save.