n Family Business
“There’s a lot of customers right now that
are trying to round out their collections.
There’s so much good material out there …
and people are trying to get their hands on
it now because it’s incredibly cheap.”
Andrew Radakovitz, son of Dimple Records owners
John and Dilyn Radakovitz, in August
attending a conference in Baltimore, Dilyn and a
group of fellow independent record store owners
learned from a newspaper story that rival chain
Tower Records was going out of business. That got
the store owners thinking about their own vulner-
abilities and what they could do to get more cus-
tomers in the stores.
“This one guy, who was really a comic-book
store (owner) ... he says, ‘Well you guys should do
comic book day,’” Dilyn recounts. “We just give
away free comics, and then we sign them up for a
service, they pay $35, then they get their comic ev-
ery month, and that makes them come back into
the store every month to get the next chapter of
that comic.”
Dilyn thought the idea was absurd — the labels
were never going to just give independent record
stores something for free. But she adapted that
idea into a more realistic one. Shortly after the
conference, she and a team of independent store
owners f lew around the country meeting with
big-name labels like Warner Records, Universal
Music Group and Sony Music to pitch the idea of
an annual record store day. The labels would give
retailers limited-run exclusives on vinyl, and the
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brick-and-mortar stores would be able to stave off
competition from digital downloads.
“Only one label cared about us, and it was At-
lantic (Records),” Dilyn says. “These guys at Atlan-
tic said, ‘We’ve got some stuff that we were trying to
promote on vinyl. … We’ll give you some of those,
we’ll sell them to you, but you can’t return them.’”
Dilyn says the first year Dimple and others ran
Record Store Day, they sold around 10 different sin-
gles and albums. Each year thereafter, more labels
signed on, but she says they mostly gave them stuff
they were probably going to give away as promos
anyway. It wasn’t very good, Dilyn says, and after
several years, she and other store owners felt they
had enough clout to demand better from the labels.
“(Now) we don’t get as much stuff on Re-
cord Store Day, but it’s better stuff,” she says two
months before Dimples’ closing. Andrew agrees.
“When you see these customers come in, it’s a
feeding frenzy. … And the reason why is because
that record that they’re trying to find, it is a limited
release — there’s only a certain number, and they
want to get their hands on it.”
Record Store Day — now hosted by nearly 1,400
independent stores across the country — has been