Hollywood Reporter
Thanks to 82 exclusive releases and limited availability, customers lined up at record stores all around the country on Saturday morning and helped kick off Record Store Day 2009 with a bang. Reports suggest traffic pick-ups and sales volume this year will exceed figures for last year’s inaugural event. “It was my best day by far,” says Eric Levin, owner of Criminal Records in Atlanta and the head of the Assn. of Independent Media Stores coalition. “We had 600 people in the store; it was well-controlled chaos. My vinyl sales alone yesterday was larger than last year’s total Record Store Day take.” Michael Kurtz, executive director of the Music Monitor Network, tells Billboard that from the stores that he heard from, “the majority of the stores had matched last year’s volume by mid-afternoon.”