Crooked Beat Records will move from Old Town North to its new Del Ray home the week after Record Store Day on April 22 (Saturday), owner Bill Daly tells ALXnow.
The store’s last day at at 802 N. Fairfax Street will be on Saturday, April 29, after which it will be open on weekends. The new store at 2417 Mount Vernon Avenue in Del Ray will likely open in June.
“I’ve been starting to move in little by little,” Daly said of the new location. “I just installed the speakers for the stereo system.”
A former DJ at North Carolina State University, Daly worked for a record shop chain for years before founding Crooked Beat Records in 1997 in Raleigh. He moved the business to Adams Morgan in D.C. in 2004 and then to Alexandria in 2016.
Daly is now restocking his used vinyl records with a few estate sale deals.
“We haven’t been buying used records for more than a year to free up storage space,” he said. “Our used records are depleted 80%, and I’m now in talks to pick up 20,000 records in an estate collection.”
Record Store Day is Daly’s biggest day of the year, when world-famous artists release new work in vinyl, like Taylor Swift’s “folklore: the long pond studio sessions.” The store opens at 9 a.m. that day, and there’s a doorman to ensure 25 are allowed in at a time.
“You’ll see 300 people lined up around the block to get records,” Daly said. “A lot of high school girls are calling me about the Taylor Swift album. For some of them it will be the first record they ever bought.”
Record sales climbed 20% nationally last year, accounting for $1.2 billion in sales, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. It’s also the first time since 1988 that record sales have outpaced CDs.
“There’s a lot of factors to account for it,” Daly said. “Some would say records have a warmer sound, that they’re a physical medium and more tangible than CDs. For all our 25 years of being open, the vinyl customers are the most loyal. They just continue to come, sometimes from two and three hours away just to buy from us.”