Lewis Capaldi Releases Mystery Vinyl In Record Stores
Scottish singer-songwriter Lewis Capaldi released a vinyl record ahead of this year’s 2026 Record Store Day with a blank white sleeve design, no artist name, or title. Stores across the UK and US, including Rough Trade, received crates of the record, featuring pitched-down vocals, from a new song by Capaldi. The records were free for customers to take, although NME reports one version already sold on eBay for £2,500 ($3,386, €2,885). Before Capaldi revealed the record was his by lip-syncing to the song’s proper studio recording in a TikTok, much hype and speculation arose. Fans were guessing online if it could be a record by The 1975, Bon Iver or Niall Horan.
Our Take: Artists might consider how vinyl records can act as keys to unlock secret experiences, rewarding fans who are curious enough to go one step further than an average listener. Lewis Capaldi’s mystery record was a calculated risk, but its success demonstrates the enduring power of the physical format and the record store’s role as a destination for cultural discovery.
The Revolver Club Celebrates Vinyl Record Lyrics In India
The Revolver Club created a collectible poster campaign, displayed in-store as well as at leading coffee shops and hangouts in Mumbai and Delhi, that celebrates lyrics from different songs containing the word ‘record’, from Dead or Alive’s ‘You Spin Me Right Round’ to Deep Purple’s ‘You Can’t Do It Right’.
The campaign spanned a diverse array of artists and genres, illustrating the enduring influence of vinyl throughout music history. Led by the tagline ‘Music is vinyl. We have it on record,’ the posters featured QR codes that allowed customers to purchase the featured record directly, creating a seamless path from discovery to ownership.
“Vinyl is a growing subculture in India,” says Hayden Scott, creative head at VIRTUE agency Asia, speaking to Little Black Book. “This campaign is specifically targeted to people who have heard of vinyl, toyed with the idea of owning it but never really taken the plunge.”
Our Take: There is an opportunity to engage first-time buyers of vinyl records by going beyond the traditional record stores and billboards. Success lies in connecting with new audiences in the spaces where they already live and socialise, using the powerful medium of music to bridge the gap between cultural familiarity and physical ownership.
MusicWatch Sheds Light on Used Vinyl Market
The record industry is currently celebrating a milestone, with new vinyl sales recently eclipsing $1 billion in annual US revenue. However, writing for Billboard, Professor Russ Crupnick, Managing Partner of MusicWatch, argues that used vinyl is the overlooked engine of the modern music ecosystem that is quietly fuelling the fire.
Since 2016, used vinyl sales have surged by 171%, consistently outselling CDs in the U.S. for several years. Crupnick suggests that this is helping fuel discovery.
“Exploring new artists or genres via used product might lead to more new physical music sales, and even increased streams, ticket and merch sales,” he notes, urging even those who don’t directly benefit from used records to consider them a key part of a healthy music ecosystem.
Our Take: More research needs to be done to understand the role of used vinyl as a low-cost entry point into the record market, as well as the impact it has by continuing to inspire fans to discover legacy artists. Moving beyond one-time sales to include used sales of a record could also help the industry understand the long-term impact of records beyond release week.
CUE BURN POLL: WHAT’S YOUR TAKE?
Q&A: Thom Skarzynski on Engaging Fans with Vinyl Records
While most of the music industry was focusing solely on streaming numbers, Thom Skarzynski noticed a huge disparity between the number of bands that were selling out arenas and the number of records actually being purchased. As the founder of Happiness, an agency that specializes in physical product strategy and indie retail campaigns, Skarzynski found that superfans weren’t just hungry for music; they were hungry for a sense of ownership.
At a time of overwhelming digital noise, Skarzynski found vinyl to be the perfect opportunity to create something authentic, human, and personal. Moving beyond mere product specs like color variants or vinyl weight, he focuses on the experiences that surprise and delight superfans, prioritising long-term engagement over short-term wins.
In this interview for CUE BURN, we speak with Skarzynski about the importance of treating record stores as destinations for discovery, the hidden opportunity in limited first pressings, and why you might just want to add confetti to your next vinyl release.
When did you realise that vinyl had such powerful potential as a tool for artists?
Thom Skarzynski: I would love to say that it happened when I was working on Travis Scott’s Astroworld because those numbers were humongous the first week. But the truth is when I was hired in 2023 to work at Fueled By Ramen, the band Twenty One Pilots was one of my first projects.
They were selling a million tickets, and their merch was going nuts. Their sales projection for record sales was somewhere in the 40,000 range, and it was based off of streaming numbers. But, I knew we just hadn’t been focused on these people the right way.
So, I went to my boss and said; “I know the forecast is 40,000, but I want to make 80,000 vinyl for the first week”. He stared at me deadpan and just said; “You will be fired”. “If these do not sell and we are sitting on 80,000 vinyl records, there is no way you will last another two weeks here.”
I knew we had to take a big swing though, and sure enough, it sold. We treated the fan base well. We knew they wanted to hold on to something physical.
That was the first time I could see our vinyl selling out faster than we anticipated. We sold out of everything. So much so that on release date, we had nothing to sell on the site. And they did an hour long YouTube livestream that aired live on TV, and we had nothing to sell during it. It was like, buy the digital album. That was the only thing left.
What made you feel so confident that you could go from 40,000 to 80,000 records?
It was just seeing the fan base. They were paying for everything but music. At the same time we were seeing Imagine Dragons selling 30,000 in the first week, and Glass Animals doing 38,000.
Both of those artists can sell out arenas across the globe, but maybe their physical plan isn’t catering to the audience the same way. Maybe they don’t have a team that’s thinking twice about it.
So, honestly, it was a big swing. But I was brought in to do exactly that. The initial conversation was, we have a whole bunch of artists here that may not stream, but that have huge fan bases, and we need to find a way to work with them.
Why has vinyl become such a powerful way for artists to connect with fans today?
Fans want something they can hold on to. They don’t necessarily care about the vinyl. Fans are just dying to hold onto something and feel a sense of ownership, which you just don’t get with streaming, or a fleeting live show.
What is your advice for artists looking to release on vinyl?
We’ve tried different approaches. When I worked with this band, A Day To Remember, we maintained the standard streaming rollout for casual fans, but gave the hardcore collectors a five-week head start on physical. So if you’re a fan you can go to a store and buy it immediately, or order from their web store. It did extremely well. I’m a big fan of the experience, not only in the store, but after the store. So, while you’re waiting for your product to come, what happens?
When I first worked at Fueled By Ramen and Roadrunner, if we had an artist in the building, we’d say, here are 20 phone numbers. You can use our phone, give them a call and thank them for ordering, and that would bubble under the fan base and we would see sales rise because of it.
Everybody’s advertising everything. It’s just noise. So for me, it’s a matter of just giving a little bit of a human touch to it. Whether that’s even in the packaging when you finally send out the vinyl when it’s released, or including a Post It note that just says thanks and your signature.
That’s the kind of thing that spreads. I’m not saying every band should hand sign 2,000 records. It feels more special if you’re the one person out of 10 or 20 that received a note saying thank you. Surprise and delight, they call it in the industry. That creates a super fan.
A human touch in a digital world goes so much further. So that’s my advice to even smaller artists. Just make it feel authentic. Make it feel human. That’s all people want.
When you’re designing a vinyl strategy today, what are the most common mistakes you still see artist teams make?
The biggest one is treating vinyl as an afterthought. Teams are deep in streaming strategy, social rollout, press, and vinyl gets added to the conversation two months before release. At that point you’re already behind. Lead times are 10-14 weeks minimum from most plants right now, and if you want something special, like a unique color, textured packaging, a die-cut, you need even more runway.
The second mistake is a lack of variety. Fans buy multiple variants. That’s not a theory, it’s what the data shows repeatedly. One color isn’t a strategy. Two or three colors with real differentiation, in the vinyl itself, the packaging, the inserts, gives fans a reason to buy more than once and gives stores something to build a display around.
When you’re designing a vinyl release that really resonates with fans, what separates something that sells from something that becomes meaningful?
Intention. Fans can feel when something was designed for them versus designed to hit a number. The releases that become meaningful are the ones where every element, the color, the paper stock, the insert, the weight of the packaging in your hands, feels considered. It tells the fan that the artist thought about this moment.
My favorite product is still a journal with handwritten lyrics and doodles tucked inside. It costs almost nothing extra to produce and fans lose their minds over it. Why? Because it feels like something the artist made for them specifically. That’s the gap most campaigns never close, the distance between “here’s a product” and “here’s something just for you.”
Do you think vinyl plays a different role to CD or other formats in a campaign, or are they interchangeable in your strategy?
They’re not interchangeable at all, they serve completely different functions and I think conflating them is a strategic mistake.
Vinyl is an identity purchase. When someone buys a record they’re saying something about who they are. It lives on a shelf, it gets displayed, it gets talked about. It’s the format fans photograph and post. It anchors a campaign culturally in a way nothing else does.
CD is a volume play and a chart play. It’s fast to produce, inexpensive, and when you build it into a configuration, a journal with a CD pocket, a boxset, a zine, it becomes chart-eligible and drives numbers in a way vinyl can’t match on speed. They work best together, not in competition.
A lot of campaigns focus on first-week impact. How should teams think about vinyl over the longer lifecycle of an album?
First-week thinking is the enemy of a great vinyl campaign. Vinyl is a slow burn by nature. Plants have lead times, stores reorder when they sell through, fans discover records months after release. I’ve seen records outsell their first-week vinyl numbers three times over in the six months that followed, purely because the stores kept getting requests and kept reordering.
The teams that win long-term treat vinyl as a living part of the campaign. New variant drops tied to tour dates, indie exclusives at specific stores, a color that only exists at independent retail, these are the tools that keep a record culturally alive a year after release. Streaming tells you how many people are aware of an artist. Physical sales tell you how deep the fandom actually goes.
How early do vinyl strategy decisions need to happen now, given manufacturing timelines?
Yesterday. Genuinely. If you’re reading this and you have a release in the next six months, you’re already in a tight window.
The honest answer is that vinyl decisions need to happen 16-20 weeks out minimum if you want any real flexibility. That means colors, configurations, packaging finishes, variant count, all of it. At 12 weeks you’re working with whatever the plant has available. At 8 weeks you’re doing a standard black pressing and hoping for the best.
I always tell teams: lock vinyl first, build everything else around it. It’s the longest pole in the tent. Treat it that way.
Do people who are preorder vinyl do so to support their favourite artists?
It’s part supporting the band and then part just like owning something cool. There’s a ton of times where people will pre-order a new album because they’re fans of the band and they’re assuming they’re gonna like it. There is a huge consumer that pre orders on, on vinyl. It’s massive. Vinyl can take up more than 75% of our overall pre-orders.
But it’s on the artist to create something interesting enough, whether that’s a vinyl variant or taking care with what it looks like or, creating things that complement the album because translating a general fan base into buyers for a specific new album is a narrow funnel. Getting people to invest upfront is the hardest thing you can do.
There are some people who want to collect everything from a band as well…
Totally. That’s why it’s unfair when it’s like 12 different versions of the album and 20 other merch items. It’s like, how much are you asking your fans to do?
You could have variance, but don’t make it so your fans are paying hundreds of dollars just to be a part of it. There should be a low entry point and then as high of an entry point as you want on the high end. But, don’t lock other people out.
You recently spoke about how vinyl is incredibly popular among Gen Z, yet many young people have never actually visited a record store. Is there actually a much bigger audience for records that just hasn’t been introduced to the culture yet?
It’s wild. I mean everyone used to think record stores were just about nostalgia. That’s completely neglecting that there’s an entire generation that’s still discovering it. Being there with the crowd, going through the bins, finding things, it’s brand new to them. Like, even the smell of a record store, you have to be there to experience it.
I love that people are doing these record store listening parties. I hate that it’s become so popular that a lot of people are just checking a box of. But then again, you see things like Harry Styles who turned it into a party based around the album. That’s what it’s supposed to be used for. Don’t only get people there to stand around with their arms crossed listening to the album. Create a scenario out of it.
I do think record stores are going to continue to flourish. I read an article recently that physical malls are also making a comeback. This generation likes going window shopping, looking through the racks of stuff. That’s pretty cool. Let’s keep encouraging them to do it.
What record stores do next will be important and it could involve taking in some collectibles, merch and selling tickets to shows. If I’m a fan looking for a Tyler the Creator figurine, I don’t know where else to go if it’s not on his web store. But if I think my local record store might have it, it becomes a destination again. And you know what… They are going to flip through the bins while they’re there and it feels good. People have to stop treating record stores like a nostalgia trip and start treating it as a place of discovery.
Do you think there’s anything the pressing plants could do help artists engage more with superfans?
So one of the things that I have seen that I actually really enjoy is a good amount of artists have been launching first pressing editions before they even announced the new album.
Instead of sending me a sample for review, do a run of 50 copies or 100 copies. Maybe you number them, maybe you sign them. It depends on how you want to interact with the fans and however you want them to experience it.
But I’d say that’s probably the closest it is like from the very first pressings that you’re making. How do you make that feel special? Because everything else is just the machine and you’re printing thousands or tens of thousands of them. It’s up to the artist right now and the company to call that out and say, hold on to those first pressings.
Do you think there are any other missed opportunities for superfans when it comes to vinyl?
It’s about giving them a great experience. What keeps superfans on, and that’s also what creates new super fans is simply putting a little extra care into it. It doesn’t have to cost money, it doesn’t have to cost much time, it’s just a matter of thinking ahead of time, “What do I want the experience to be?”
Super fans are the lifeblood of the industry. They’re at every show, purchasing everything. So what’s a way to kind of give back to them, or find a way to connect with them?
Make sure that the unboxing experience is good. I forget which album it was, but Taylor Swift. shipped something like 400,000 and each one came with confetti inside. If she can do that at that scale then like you with your thousand vinyl can do a cool idea that’s unique to you as well. Or hell, do confetti!
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. The views expressed are solely those of the featured creators and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Vinyl Alliance.
Have a vinyl industry story to share? We’d love to hear it! Email us at cueburn@vinylalliance.org and let’s start the conversation.
Vinyl Alliance at Music Biz 2026: Analog in the Age of Algorithms
The Vinyl Alliance is proud to be programming a panel at this year’s Music Biz Conference, exploring what vinyl’s continued rise can teach the wider music business.
Analog in the Age of Algorithms: Lessons from Vinyl’s Resilient Rise will look at how streaming discovery, social media, fan communities, and artist-led campaigns are driving physical sales in new ways. Featuring voices from Warner Music Group, Atlantic Music Group, Vertigo Vinyl and more, the conversation will unpack why vinyl is no longer a niche concern, but an increasingly strategic part of the modern music economy.
The panel takes place Monday, May 11th at 3:25pm as part of the conference’s Let’s Talk Physical program. More info here.
Vinyl Alliance members from across the supply chain will be attending Music Biz. If you’ll be there and would like to connect, please get in touch!
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