How Record Store Day Became the Stupidest Day in Music ⇥ defector.com

John Semley, Defector:

At a very basic level, commodity fetishism is fine, and probably pretty normal: a way of declaring, “Here is my stuff that I like.” It can be an expression not only of personal curatorial habits, but of taste, and identity. But commodities conceived along the line of Record Store Day exclusives push this to an extreme. Their use-value is practically nil. They are only commodities. And as far as statements of taste and identity go, they announce only “I am a big-time commodity fetishist!”

It is truly remarkable to me how pliable we all are even when we know these tactics. We know this is why smartphones come in different colours every year, and why there is the very notion of a “limited edition” even if that edition numbers in the hundreds of thousands.

To repurpose or recontextualize Goodhart’s law, when something becomes the product of attention, it will eventually lose the reason for that attention. Record Store Day began in good faith, which has been taken advantage of to, in 2025, sell Post Malone’s Nirvana livestream on vinyl for $37. Be quick — there are only seventeen thousand copies available.