Today is the day the music industry inaugurates universal release day (aka New Music Fridays), meaning all new physical and digital releases worldwide will come out on Friday until further notice. Since 1989 in the United States, new release day has been Tuesday. Obviously, this move was instituted to increase sales, but not everyone in Seattle’s music retail environment thinks it’s going to make that much of difference.
Jeffery Taylor, co-owner of the tiny but excellently curated Wall of Sound, says, “We’ve never really had a street-date sort of clientele anyway. It ain’t gonna change much for us.” (By the way, Silver Platters boss Mike Blatt couldn’t respond to this because he was too busy working on moving his Northgate store to its new Lynnwood location at Alderwood Village by July 14. The move was precipitated by Sound Transit taking over the building for the light rail system.)
As for whether universal record release day will have a positive or negative affect on business, Everyday Music manager Josh Hansen says, “I don't anticipate this having much of an impact on business. It may shift more of our business to the weekend, but that has been a general trend for the past few years. About 80 percent of our sales happen Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.” Sonic Boom manager Matt Welles says, “In the long run, I don’t think it will make that big of a difference. In the short run, there’s going to be confusion for customers, because they’re used to the street date being Tuesday. So we’ll just have to tell everybody and re-educate them.”
Easy Street Records owner Matt Vaughan has a lot to say about this matter:
A lot of retailers have been up in arms over it for a few months. It was done to appease the digital world a little bit, because a lot of records were being released digitally on Friday, so this put the street date for brick and mortar shops and digital sites on the same day. It’s also supposed to curtail piracy. Records were getting leaked weeks and months before they were officially released to the masses around street dates. That’s another reason labels decided to do this. Friday is already busy, so for us it’s just a busier day. That’s great at the cash register, but it makes for a busy day for the staff on those Thursdays and Fridays. It can make it more chaotic than it already is. That’s the only thing concerning me.
Vaughan added:
It’s been nice getting the sales bump on Tuesdays. If it wasn’t already one of the slowest days, it will be now, without having that street date. I’m so used to that Tuesday street date. Ask me in a month or two after and we’ll look at our monthly [Profit and Loss] statements and see if it’s made a difference. I don’t know if it really will. But we may cut a shift or two on [Tuesdays] because it’s just not going to be as busy. And I doubt that we would add a body or two on Fridays because we’re already expected to have a busy day. The other thing to consider is, it doesn’t give us much reaction time if a record starts to pop. If you’re getting unexpected sales and you run out on Tuesday or Wednesday… This happened a couple of weeks ago with a new R&B singer, Leon Bridges. He was on [The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon] on Monday, the record dropped Tuesday, was starting to get radio play in the days leading up to it, and everyone wanted it that day. We were sold out. But we were able to react to it and re-order the same day. You don’t have that opportunity now because your distributors and labels are closed for business, unless you’re selling out early Friday afternoon. But most likely you’re not going to get those orders in on time so that you have more stock on Monday or Tuesday. You may lose a lot of sales on some of these records that are unexpected sellers.
What advantages, if any, do local music retailers perceive for new releases coming out on Friday? “I don't really see any advantages to the Friday release day,” says Everyday’s Hansen. “And there were no advantages to Tuesday, either, aside from it being a regular weekly thing for decades. New releases days rarely draw a lot of business these days. And the days of lining up to get the new Radiohead or whomever album are long gone.” Sonic Boom’s Welles concurs. “My understanding of it is, it’s to harmonize it with all the other new releases for other sorts of media and for digital, so everything comes out on one day instead of throughout the week. I don’t see any huge advantages. Particularly for our store, the people who buy vinyl are pretty invested in it already. Whether stuff comes out on Tuesday or Friday is probably not a big issue for them. It’ll make things easier and less confusing if physical and digital releases come out on the same day.”
Easy Street’s Vaughan thinks the Friday new-release date could be a boon to business. “If you do your record shopping on Friday or the weekend, it can be a more exciting day and we might have bigger transactions because of it. What we would find on Tuesdays are people racing in to find that new Oh Sees record or get that new Madonna record and that’s it. They’re getting their favorite artist’s new record. Now if it’s a Friday, there’s already a lot of activity happening. We’re already pretty well stocked for the weekend. I could see where those transactions could be a little higher than normal. I’m not too freaked out about [this change].”
These observations are all well and good, but what does former Oasis creative catalyst/current High Flying Birds main man Noel Gallagher think about Global Release Day? "Some fucker’s focus grouped that in a room somewhere to maximize some amount of record sales," he told NME. "If we have it on a Friday, then by the time it gets to Monday we’ll have already sold a million albums if one is Taylor Swift, presumably. Unfortunately, it won’t make shit albums any better, will it? They’ll still sound shit on a fucking Friday.” Gallagher defiantly claims that his own label, Sour Mash, will put out its releases on Wednesday, because he's a contrary bastard.
In other news, every person I contacted for this post cheerfully reported that business this year is doing slightly better than last year's figures, with vinyl sales continuing to rise and CD purchases declining.
