Larry Jaffee on Record Store Day, the Vinyl Revival, and the Future of Plant-Based Records

Welcome to The Sharp Notes Podcast. I’m Evan Toth, and this episode was recorded live in front of an audience at The Sharp Notes record store inside the Garden State Plaza in Paramus, New Jersey.My guest is author, journalist, and vinyl-world lifer Larry Jaffee, a guy whose career has basically been one long field recording of the music business, from punk chaos to pressing plant logistics. Larry wrote Record Store Day: The Most Improbable Comeback of the 21st Century, the inside story of how a scrappy idea turned into the biggest annual holiday on the record collector calendar, and why independent shops went from “endangered species” to cultural town squares again.But Larry’s not just chronicling the vinyl revival. He’s trying to rewire it. This interview was recorded just days before he moved to Iceland to co-found Thermal Beets Records, a geothermal-powered pressing plant concept aiming at making plant-based records from sugar beets instead of traditional PVC. So yes, we go from limited edition RSD lore to the question lurking behind every new release: what does it cost, environmentally, and otherwise, to keep this format alive and thriving?