Record Store Day 2026 is in the bag. The shop’s tidied up, the Saturday-only releases that didn’t sell are back in the racks, and I’ve had a coffee strong enough to think clearly about what the day actually told us.

The line outside the shop was longer than 2024 and shorter than 2019. That feels right. Vinyl culture isn’t dying and it isn’t booming. It’s settling into something more sustainable, with a core of obsessives and a steady trickle of new converts who got there through their parents’ collection or a friend’s good system.

The Australian-content RSD releases sold through fast. The big-name international exclusives moved well too, though not in the panicked way they used to. The collectors-only oddities (the third repressing of an obscure 1973 Italian prog album) sat on the shelf longer than the artists’ egos would have liked.

What stood out this year is that the under-25 crowd was bigger and more confident. They knew what they wanted. They asked smart questions. A few of them spent serious money on first pressings. That’s the most encouraging thing I’ve seen in three years of running this shop, because the cliche about vinyl being a Gen X nostalgia trip has a real expiry date if it doesn’t hand off to the next generation.

The downside, as always, is the speculator problem. About one in ten of the bigger releases ended up on Discogs at a markup within forty-eight hours. There’s no clean fix for this. Reservations help a bit, ID checks help a bit, but the ecosystem is what it is.

The Australian indie label exclusives were the highlight for me. A handful of small Melbourne and Brisbane labels put out genuinely interesting limited pressings that real fans bought to actually play. That’s the thread that keeps RSD worth doing. Strip away the speculator stuff and the corporate exclusives, and underneath there’s still a community of people who care about the artefact, the music, and the shop.