Where would we be without our record stores? Possibly hocking CDs to disinterested caffeine-fueled shoppers on Queen Street, or covered in homemade glue at 3am on every street corner at every intersection, or refreshing our browsers for hours on end trying to make the MySpace music player work properly.

But we in Toronto are lucky. We have some amazing record shops and we should be grateful to them, and today is the day to show them that gratitude! Go out and buy records, buy local music, buy rare free jazz on vinyl, buy a homemade cassette LP, buy a book or a DVD on your favourite musical genre, just drop by a record store and say hi, maybe check out a track on a listening station. I’m sure whatever’s playing over the store’s speakers is worth buying right now.

Our record stores are as important a part of our local music community as all the bands, venues, promoters, concert series, blogs, messageboards and audiences. They provide advance tickets to your favourite shows (concert listings just aren’t the same without the initials SS or RT and others beside them), put on free in-store concerts helping out musicians with promotion and audiences with a chance to see a band in a more intimate setting. They stock your record whether you’ve pressed a thousand or just five copies duct taped together and smelling of nail polish. They put up your show posters in their front windows and create elaborate and beautiful window displays celebrating your record.

There is an entire history of record stores here in Toronto that we should probably get into, but today we’re just celebrating them. So let’s be thankful and proud we live in a city with such amazing shops as Soundscapes, Rotate This, Sonic Boom, Criminal Records, She Said Boom, Penguin Music, Zoinks and every other shop helping out local music.

We owe you!

P.S.: Since its inception Wavelength has been kindly sponsored in part by Soundscapes. They helped get the original zine off the ground, spread the word about the weekly shows and put up our sometimes ridiculously large posters in their window. Sure, we’ve put their name or logo in tiny fonts on flyers and the website but they deserve a hell of a lot more and we want to give an extra special thanks to Soundscapes!

You should drop by their shop at 572 College St. in Little Italy. The staff are super friendly and half of them probably play in some of your favourite bands. They have great in-store performances all the time and are well stocked with everything local and tons of everything else. Thanks for all your hard work Soundscapes!

- posted by Kevin