Before Small Business Saturday or Cyber Monday--the organizers of Record Store Day began the RSD Black Friday event as a way to highlight and include independent record stores in the biggest shopping day of the year. Since then, record stores have started the holiday shopping season with an RSD Black Friday twist: a curated list of releases created especially for them, adding to the mix of items already found in record stores, all of which make exceptionally good gifts.

It has been a phenomenal success and this year’s Black Friday sales of the Top 500 bestsellers were up 25% over 2022, and individual stores report weekend year-over-year increases as high as 40%!  

According to the data collection company Street Pulse, the best selling records at independent record stores that weekend was Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts: the secret tracks which was released on opaque deep purple vinyl, etched with a Butterfly on Side B. And even though Taylor Swift did not have a specific RSD Black Friday release, she was still the 4th biggest-selling artist at record stores on Black Friday weekend.

Though some titles, like the never-before-on-vinyl Cape Elizabeth from Noah Kahan sold out quickly, other releases across all genres, including special packages from Post Malone, De La Soul, Joni Mitchell, U2, Dr. Dre and Jerry Garcia remain, as intended, for shoppers to discover in record store bins this season, ready to be wrapped up! A chart of the Top 50 RSD Black Friday titles can be found on the Record Store Day website or at bit.ly/RSDBFCHART

This year, there’s another way to bring home record store exclusives: the RSD MRKT publicly launched at https://rsdmrkt.com.  A brand-new marketplace platform for brick-and-mortar record stores to sell new product, the RSD MRKT offers customers a chance to search for and find specific releases, including Record Store Day and RSD Black Friday releases from 2023 and past events, titles in the RSD Essentials line from Cured Vinyl/Think Indie and indie-exclusive variants of wide releases. With more than 260 stores and over 25,000 titles at launch, the 24/7 online record store fair is off to a booming start!

Black Friday Top 25 Best Sellers at Independent Record Stores