In the last half decade, Record Store Day has inspired some bizarre limited edition offerings. This year, for example, you can snag a split 7" featuring Toronto indie cooer Feist and her polar opposite, Atlanta metal growlers Mastodon, covering each other's songs as—you guessed it—Feistodon. If that unlikely combination isn't mind-boggling enough, you can add a Flaming Lips record infused with the blood of its collaborators to your shopping list.But behind the strange must-haves are some eye brow-raising statistics: since RSD's inception in 2007, the sale of vinyl has skyrocketed from 1 million units sold in the U.S. in 2006 to 4.2 million in the last year. "Almost all the [pressing] plants had gone out of business," the event's co-founder Michael Kurtz told me. "When we said we're going to do this and it's going to be on vinyl we gave these plants confidence."I talked to Kurtz on the eve of the event's fifth installment about the resurgence of vinyl, the value of the neighborhood record store, and whether the second to last Saturday in April is enough to save an ailing industry.How has Record Store Day evolved over the last five years?It started out as an idea talked about over coffee with record store owners. We reached out to some artists and managers and asked, 'What do you think?' We got a nice letter back from Paul McCartney and a bunch of other people, Tom Waits, Patton Oswalt. In the beginning we put out about 10 records. This year we're putting out releases from over 300 artists with $6 million. And that's just the U.S.So you had big names interested in participating from the beginning?We felt we had to get some recognizable names, but we had some people on the fringe like Stephen Malkmus. He was one of the first to create something for Record Store Day. What happened is the artists are doing it themselves. A lot of the times labels are trailing behind the artists. I don't even know if Feist had permission from Interscope. She just did it. With Flaming Lips I was talking to Warner Brothers and I was like, 'Is this going to make it?' They said, 'We don't know.' Up until two weeks ago the vinyl wasn't pressed.Record Store Day includes CDs, but is it mostly vinyl?It's like 90% vinyl. This year I think we had CDs from Willie Nelson and Matt Nathanson in the Civil Wars, but there are about four CDs. With vinyl the artists can be creative, have fun, create wild images. They love that it's limited. It's a piece of art. Flaming Lips, going back to that, I realized every single record has an inscription in the wax by the band. Let me read you one. It says, 'So girl you and me watch each other pee.' It's weird.What about vinyl is so appealing to people again?There's a collective aspect to it. Most people who celebrate Record Store Day are under the age of 30. It's their first experience with the fan type thing, outside of concerts or band t-shirts. The second thing is the romantic aspect. It's not logical, but it feels good. It's an intangible. The digital experience is insular and individual. The record is more a communal thing. The third thing is record stores make up over 70% of all the vinyl that's sold. It's done in a community way. You have to be part of a community to get access to this stuff. It creates its own universe.Is the day really about records at this point or is it more of an event?What it is is it predates Occupy Wall Street in that it's an open source event that people took ownership of. We do have a pledge we ask record stores to sign: don't sell on eBay, don't rip off customers. We try to set a bit of a bar, but they do whatever they want. Some have cake, some serve beer, others have film screenings. It's weird, if I said six years ago, 'We'll create this day and everyone will come out and buy 7"s and you'll love it so much that you'll serve your customers beer' everyone would've said, 'You're crazy.'This one day isn't enough to keep record stores in business though.Business-wise it's successful enough that it makes them confident to be better record stores. In L.A. where I live we've had seven new stores open up in the last six months. They're almost all strictly vinyl. It keeps expanding.Do you think it's possible vinyl will keep record stores alive?Yeah. It's very much like the gaming business. There's no money in new games. It's buying and selling used games. At least 60 to 70% of what [customers] buy is some classic used copy of Velvet Underground's original pressing of White Light White Heat.Do you ever use iTunes?I buy UK television shows you can only get in the U.S. on iTunes. But for me I work on the computer all the time, so the idea of listening to music on my computer is not appealing to me. If I'm in my car I listen to Sirius XMU radio, which is like Spotify, so I'm not against that or anything.What will happen if record stores cease to exist?I've been around long enough that I've seen when all the big box stores stormed through and decimated record stores. They wiped out the record stores with Best Buy and Target and all that culture died. But if it were to really go, it would be so corporate it would be unimaginable. When you get into corporate culture it's about amassing numbers. They need big numbers for it to make sense. When you get into that it becomes about the Justin Biebers—not that there's anything wrong with that—but it becomes way more about that than the art and music. That's why if you look at the Record Store Day launch five years ago and how big we've become and all of the bands coming out in the last few years, there's a connection.Is there a release this year you're most looking forward to?Regina Spektor's 7". It's the first one she's done in Russian. I haven't heard it yet and I'm looking forward to it. So much of it is bands doing it on their own. It's part of the wild beast. Jack White almost always at the last minute does a show or puts out a record. He's another one that's really unpredictable. You never know with him, which we love. We love that aspect of it.
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