Record Store Day 2025: A guide to the annual celebration for vinyl lovers everywhere
The annual event began in 2008 to celebrate the people who work at and frequent indie record stores. It has since been embraced by musicians and bands of all sizes and genres.
'The whole energy in a record store is just super inspiring. I feel at home,' Post Malone, who is serving as this year's Record Store Day ambassador, said in a statement after being chosen as the 2025 honoree. 'It's really an unexplainable feeling to hit up a shop and dig through crates, just see what grabs your eye. You can be looking for something super specific and end up finding something totally different. It's the best.'
Vinyl lovers would seem to agree. While streaming services now account for most of the music industry's revenue, record buying in the United States continues to grow. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, sales of vinyl records outpaced that of CDs in the U.S. for the third consecutive year in 2024. There were 44 million vinyl records shipped last year, compared with 33 million CDs. And revenues from vinyl records grew 7% to $1.4 billion in 2024 — the 18th consecutive year of growth.
All of which means it should be another busy day at record shops on Saturday.
To find a participating record store near you, check this searchable list. Below is a quick guide to just some of what's in store for those participating in Record Store Day 2025.
Austin City Limits, the longest-running music series in television history, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. And Howard, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter and Alabama Shakes frontwoman, is releasing her electric 2024 performance on the show for Record Store Day.
Speaking of exclusives, Slow Magic is a collection of never-before-released songs by Jeff Bridges (yes, that Jeff Bridges) culled from a cassette tape labeled 'July 1978.' According to notes from the record label, the music sounds like 'The Band playing at CBGB' or 'Arthur Russell and the Talking Heads collaborating on a suite of mutant disco.' And it most definitely doesn't sound like the Eagles.
Deadheads have a lot to celebrate on Record Store Day, with four new releases, including this 1976 live recording of the band at New York's Beacon Theatre, available for the first time on vinyl.
Ahead of their long-awaited reunion tour, which kicks off later this year, the Britpop band's entire singles collection from 1994 to 2009 is being released on vinyl for the first time since its initial pressing in 2010.
The singer and 2025 Record Store Day ambassador is releasing his COVID-era 2020 livestream tribute to Nirvana, which featured Blink-182's Travis Barker on drums and included covers of Nirvana classics like 'Come as You Are,' 'Heart Shaped Box' and 'In Bloom.' All net proceeds from the sale of this record will be donated to MusiCares's addiction recovery and mental health efforts.
The A side of the soundtrack to this 1984 cult classic film contains six songs performed by Kilmer, who died earlier this month. (Its release on vinyl for Record Store Day was announced well before his death.) The B side contains selections from the film's score.
The Stones have embraced Record Store Day in recent years, and this year they're rereleasing the remastered Out of Our Heads, the 1965 studio album featuring their iconic hit '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction.' Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood have new live solo Record Store Day releases too.
The biggest and likely heaviest release for Record Store Day 2025, this 1970 live recording by legendary jazz pianist and bandleader Sun Ra spans six LPs and comes in a hardboard box.
Swifties like vinyl records too! And 'Fortnight,' from The Tortured Poets Department, is getting the RSD treatment. The exclusive 7" white vinyl release features both the original single featuring Post Malone and a remix by Blond:ish.
The soundtrack to the ubiquitous 2024 film adaptation of the musical features 12 songs by Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo and the rest of the cast, including one previously unreleased duet. Crucially, the limited-edition double LP released exclusively for Record Store Day was pressed on green and pink glitter vinyl.
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The literary culture of 2005 is alive and well Here are some characteristics of the literary world of 2005: an enchantment with a group of talented young male writers who wrote primarily big social novels and a lot of excitement about the literary possibilities of a nascent blogosphere. Here are some characteristics of the Substack literary scene: a lot of young male writers, a lot of social novels, and a lot of excitement about the literary possibilities of newsletter essays. Glass Century and Major Arcana are both big, sprawling novels that take place over decades, and Glass Century, in particular, reads as though it was written under the influence of Jonathan Franzen. That's a departure from what's been more recently in vogue, like Karl Ove Knausgaard's titanic autofictional saga. 'I think there's a lot of nostalgia for a time when the novel was maybe a more discussed form or a more vital form or trying to capture a lot more of contemporary society.' 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Franzen famously wrote an essay for Harper's in 1996 in which he describes his 'despair about the American novel' after the jingoism of the lead up to the first Gulf War. Franzen thought that television was bad for the novel; he hadn't yet seen what TikTok could do to a person. While the Franzen mode pops up a lot with this crowd, there are outliers to this loose trend. Gasda's Sleeper is very much a product of millennial fiction (detached voice describing the foibles of Brooklyn literati), and Kanakia's work on Substack, which she calls her 'tales,' tends to be sparse, with little attention paid to description or setting. There's also the question of gender. The amount of men in this literary Substack scene is particularly notable in a moment so rich with essays about the disappearance of men who care about and write books. Some observers have drawn a lesson of sorts from this phenomenon: The mainstream literary world alienated men. They had to flee to Substack to build their own safe haven. 'The literary establishment treats male American writers with contempt,' wrote the writer Alex Perez on his Substack last August. His commenters agreed. The answer, they concluded, was building a platform and self publishing. 'I'm a middle-aged, straight, white, conservative, rich male who writes literary fiction. It's like a demographic poo Yahtzee. I don't stand a chance,' wrote one commenter. 'But I have 85K Twitter followers and an email list with thousands of people, so I can self-publish and sell 5,000 copies of anything I write.' 'These aren't manosphere men who are constantly raging against the influence of women on fiction. These are men just writing.' For the Metropolitan Review crowd, the amount of men in Substack's literary scene is mostly value-neutral. 'I do think there's something to the fact that when I got on Substack, I was like, 'These are people that are producing work that I'm actually interested in and I actually find compelling,' and that they were probably majority men,' said Begler. 'Overall, it's a rather welcoming environment for all,' Barkan adds. 'These aren't manosphere men who are constantly raging against the influence of women on fiction. These are men just writing.' Kanakia thinks the narrative about literary white men is more complicated than literary white men let on, but ultimately harmless. 'In 2025 the varieties of men advocating for themselves — most of them are very horrific. This variety is not so bad,' she says. 'If they want a book deal at Scribners, like, fine, if that'll make you happy. That'll be great. I have no problem with that.' In the meantime, literary Substack keeps expanding. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon just signed up. 'It's smart of him,' says Barkan. 'If I were Michael Chabon and was working on a novel, I would be on Substack. I think more literary writers who have platforms already should be there.' The closest antecedent to this moment did not last. The literary moment of 2005 was blown apart the way everything of that era was: under the pressure of the 2008 recession and the so-called Great Awokening, under the slow collapse of the blogosphere as social media took off — and everything that came along with them. Will the same thing happen to this crowd? It's hard to know for sure this early. At least for right now, Substack is having its summer.
