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This year Record Store Day took place on April 20. As part of my internship at Minty Fresh, I helped put together a reissue of Komeda’s Genius Of Komeda. for release on Record Store Day. It sold out.

Record Store Day began in 2008 and takes place every third Saturday in April as a way to celebrate the indie record store. The day is all about supporting your local record store and buying one of the many new and re-issued vinyls available as Record Store Day exclusives. Limited edition vinyl and CDs are made for the day and hundreds of artists in the United States make in-store appearances. This year I got my hands on At The Drive-In’s Relationship of Command, one of my favorite albums of all time!

At Minty Fresh we decided to release Komeda’s The Genius Of Komeda, the Swedish band’s second full-length studio album and first to be given an international release. The album originally hit the shelves in 1996, and was their first release sung in English. It is a fantastic indie-pop album and sounds even better now given that we had it specially remastered and pressed on heavy 180g vinyl. It literally sounds like the band is playing in the room with you!

I helped with a few aspects of the release. Firstly I put together a P&L projection spreadsheet so that we could calculate the price point, costs of manufacturing, and cost of distribution for the LP. I then re-built the original CD artwork to fit the larger format vinyl sleeve. This was quite an intensive process, as the original files had been misplaced. I had to do a lot of scanning and photoshopping (looking at you, gaussian blur!) in order to create a larger enough image of decent quality from the smaller CD sleeve. In the end it came together and when we got the final product from the manufacturer it looked and sounded amazing.

Have a listen to the Genius Of Komeda. It won’t sound as good as the vinyl but still…

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For more info on Record Store Day check out recordstoreday.com