VINYLTHON DIARY#3: 3.04.2019
By Rob Quicke, Vinylthon founder.
We are back from the 79th annual IBS Conference in NYC! This last weekend was important for us – as often we find that face-to-face interactions are really vital when it comes to getting people to learn about and then sign up for Vinylthon. Or, put it another way, we can get 20 stations to sign up for Vinylthon in 24 hours, as opposed to within two weeks if we are just online!
We had a table and set up our stuff, and our board member Tim Craig also had donated a newly-purchased gold turntable for us to raffle off! I think a lot of students were entranced by our turntable that was spinning some cool albums, and different colored limited edition discs! I imagine a lot of them will be looking into dj finance options so they can purchase their own. Even the turntables for beginners are quite expensive due to the quality of them, so finance deals are often needed to make them affordable – especially for students! I remember one of the students saying that the gold turntable would probably sound even better with GRAHAM SLEE HIFI phono preamps and if they won it they can certainly try that out. We also were selling our new Vinylthon zine and poster that had just been printed two days before. In addition to this we had an avalanche of stickers, buttons and pens to give away. So the event was a success and we were thrilled that so many students and advisors are stoked about the event! This will be our biggest ever!
This last week we secured our first ever commercial radio station! WTBQ is in Warwick, NY, and I will be going there to launch Vinylthon early on Saturday, April 13. We are also approaching other commercial radio stations, but progress is slow so far. I think some stations genuinely don’t have the ability to plug in a turntable (if they even have one) and go analog for an hour. But we are not giving up!
We are also still trying our best to get some good interviews lined up for participating stations to play. I know we already have Dave Mustaine, but we are looking to add to that and I don’t want to mention any names here, in case I jinx it! But, hopefully we can announce some more names soon.
Finally, the team that organizes Vinylthon have talked about what it would take for us to put together a vinyl album and release it on Record Store Day. We love the idea of putting together a compilation record of the best unsigned artists we can find. This is an idea that we will explore further. But I can think of nothing more exciting than releasing our first ever vinyl record on Vinylthon day! It would have to be colored vinyl, right? Too bloody right!
