With more record stores per capita than any other city, Melbourne is officially the record store capital of the world—one area in particular has 19 stores. In time for Record Store Day on April 18, writer Sarah Smith asks: Why does vinyl rule in this Australian city?
“Are you having a fuuuuunky day?” Chris Gill, the owner and bioluminescent mascot of Melbourne’s Northside Records, bellows the moment I step inside his baby blue-hued house of wax.
A bushel of graying curls bops around the counter, mega-watt smile catching the light from an oval-shaped disco ball designed to look like the iconically oblong Australian Rules football. Surprise Chef is blasting. Solo music heads are flipping through crates. A mum and daughter are listening to Amy Winehouse’s Frank at a turntable. Tourists are nabbing selfies in front of an ‘I Heart James Brown’ poster.
Northside Records is one of Melbourne’s most beloved record stores. Founded in 2002, it specializes in jazz, funk, hip-hop, soul—“Grooooove-based stuff,” says Gill. And in that time, it’s ballooned into a living, wiggling, ever-evolving home to Melbourne’s incredible neo-soul scene, a place where musicians hang out, play gigs, sign records, the heartbeat at the center of Melbourne’s inner-city hipster hub, Fitzroy. Visit on the right day and you might see Hiatus Kaiyote performing, George Clinton signing records or even Mark Ronson having a dig.
Cross the road to Smith Street, Collingwood and you’ll find The Searchers, a record store chock-full of rare finds with a special flair for uncovering gems from the heavier end of the music spectrum. On the same street, you can drop into Plug Seven, Wah Wah records, Happy Valley and Skydiver––a dance music record store that flips into a bar with DJs on the weekends. In fact, within 1.5 square miles (2.5 square kilometers) of this strip, there’s a shop slinging vinyl roughly every 1,000 feet (350 meters).
Melbourne officially has more record stores per capita than any other city on Earth. With a population of 5.5 million, it has 5.9 stores per 100,000 residents, more per person than Tokyo, London and Berlin, and with a total of 119 record stores, the city is home to half of Australia’s independent vinyl outlets. But why?
For 50 years, ever since AC/DC strapped a stack of amps to the back of a flatbed truck and rolled down Swanston Street in Melbourne’s CBD blasting It’s a Long Way to the Top Melbourne’s had a reputation as a rock’n’roll city. But many Melburnians would argue theirs is a city that simply loves music, no matter what it sounds like or how it’s made.
The same cultural milieu that produced globally recognized artists like Nick Cave, Men at Work, Crowded House, Jet, Courtney Barnett, King Gizzard and The Wizard Lizard, The Avalanches, Gotye, Hiatus Kaiyote and Amyl and The Sniffers, simultaneously supports dozens of small experimental scenes, the most independent record labels in the country, and two of the Southern Hemisphere’s largest and most influential community radio stations in 3RRR FM and PBS FM.
And prior to the pandemic—which saw Melbourne endure the world’s longest lockdowns, consequently shuttering hundreds of music venues—the city also had the most live music venues per capita in the world. “Melbourne is a city of music obsessives. Everyone who lives here will tell you,” says Gill. How and why this came to be depends on who you talk to.
“You’re not sifting through 10,000 soul records like you might in a shop in the US. But you’ll walk in and find good-quality, rare and interesting records fast. The hard work has been done for you.”
- Lloyd Dewar, radio host and DJ
Melbourne is about a 25-hour plane ride to New York. 26 to Berlin. 22, on a good haul, to London. Even by 2026 travel standards, that’s really far away from the rest of the world. But it’s this very distance that created the foundations for a city obsessed by music, building up a fiercely DIY mentality and fostering a creative community whose approach from early on has been: “No-one’s going to do this unless we do it ourselves”.
“Go back as far as the ‘50s and ‘60s, and Melbourne had record import stores,” says Dave Reitman, owner of Licorice Pie records, a record-digging institution based in Collingwood Yards—an eclectic arts precinct at the heart of Melborune’s vinyl hotbed, home to an original Keith Haring Mural, galleries, bars and community radio station PBS FM—which, alongside the town’s biggest musicheads, has seen the likes of DJ Shadow, Afrika Bambaataa, Henry Rollins and Stranger Cole sifting through its crates over the years.
“That’s a pretty unique thing for a city of Melbourne’s size, at that particular time,” he tells me. “While places like Paris, and Berlin could get access to all of the latest and obscure releases, we were often at the whim at what the labels wanted to release here. So we had these real trailblazers importing obscure releases from all over the globe.”
Reitman mentions import stores like Manns and The Disc Shop among the earliest to be bringing in discs, followed by pioneering institutions like Archie N’ Jugheads (later Missing Link records), then Euphoria, and blues and rock’n’roll specialist shop Hound Dog’s Bop Shop, to name a few.
“These stores were often up against regulations, and what-not,” Reitman explains. “The major record labels wielded a fair bit of power as to what was to be sold and pressed in Australia, so often, these early import places were operating in a kind of gray market––responding to what music fanatics wanted to hear but we couldn’t get.”
The owner of Hound Dog’s, Denys Williams, was one of the first Australians to actually go overseas and hunt for records, curating a store of really rare vinyl, building a reputation that extended well beyond the Southern Hemisphere. These import stores would become tiny beacons, places for people to gather and swap ideas about music. And over time, they’ve fostered a sense of culture and curation that has stuck in the city’s blood for years, and laid the foundations for the collector mindset and DIY attitude that makes Melbourne what it is today.
Over decades, as stores fed strange sounds and rare vinyl into the city and onto community radio airwaves, that impact has been felt in unexpected ways. “Melbourne probably has the most kraut rock (experimental rock music that emerged from West Germany in the 60s and 70s) records in the world outside of say Berlin or Hamburg,” says Reitman. “All because a pair of music fanatics who ran Pipe Import Records—Jeremy Fiebiger and Daniel Janecka—were importing them by the thousands in the ‘70s.”
“You have some of the deepest private soul and blues collections in the world in Melbourne,” Lloyd Dewar AKA Mohair Slim, radio host and DJ, shares, “which would probably surprise some people but makes sense when you begin to understand the history of the city’s record stores”.
As a result, Melbourne in 2026 has some of the world’s best curated record stores. While they’ll never compete with the sheer volume available in Japan, Europe and the US, the city’s vinyl slingers pride themselves on doing the digging so that the experience of finding good music in quality condition is streamlined and enjoyable. “You’re not sifting through 10,000 soul records like you might in a shop in the US,” says Slim. “But you’ll walk in and find good-quality, rare and interesting records fast. The hard work has been done for you.”
There’s a line in John Cusack’s 2000 cult record store rom-com High Fidelity that has––fairly or not––come to define record store clerks the world over:
“You guys are snobs. You’re totally elitist. You feel like the underappreciated scholars, so you shit on the people that know less than you––which is everybody. It’s just sad.”
Slung by a regular customer to the staff of Cusack’s fictional store ‘Championship Vinyl’, this blistering character assessment perfectly captures the reputation of record stores as unwelcoming and elitist spaces, emanating a vibe that buying vinyl requires a preordained level of music-nerdery. Don’t know the Eugene McDaniels sample used on A Tribe Called Quest’s Bonita Applebum? Don’t bother stepping inside.
“The attitude here is really positive–most record store owners will give you the time of day. It can be extremely intimidating stepping into these spaces, but when I just started getting into buying vinyl I was encouraged and made to feel welcome by the stores I visited.”
- Bridget Small, Program Records
While being a collector is, by its very nature, an exclusive kind of endeavor (and music snobs will somewhat proudly always exist), record stores have evolved a lot in the last couple of decades. These days, most of Melbourne’s record stores are an extension of the wider music community. A place to dig, sure, but also hang out, see bands and even (in some instances, at least) pick up a copy of Taylor Swift’s Life of a Showgirl on vinyl, without judgement.
“The record store became a stronger version of itself over the years,” says Gill. “It’s all about the people.” When he first opened Northside, his intention was to build a retail store that celebrated music while being a place where anyone in the community could gather. “We wanted to appeal to the 50 percent of the population that had been largely ignored by this industry—anyone that might have traditionally felt uncomfortable stepping inside.”
Greville Records, in the affluent southside suburb of Prahran––where high-end fashion boutiques share walls with thumping clubs, iconic late-night kebab shops and bougie brunch spots––is another interesting example of that evolution. Opened in 1978 to service the city’s rabid punk fans desperate to get a copy of the latest Ramones or Sex Pistols album, the former owners regularly traveled to the US and UK to lug bounty back to Melbourne. “Our clientele has changed a lot since then,” says current co-owner, radio DJ and Melbourne music historian Bruce Milne.
“In the early 2000s, a lot of Melbourne’s record shops actually disappeared, and Greville just managed to scrape by each week until the vinyl revival started to happen around the 2010s,” he tells me. “These days, we have a lot of really young people buying new-er top of the charts stuff—Charli XCX even did a signing in store back in 2018.”
Melbourne has two vinyl pressing plants (Program Records and Zenith Records), which means local artists and independent labels and distributors can viably do small record runs, then stocked and championed by record stores, and usually well-supported on community radio. About 25-50 percent of vinyl on Melbourne’s shelves is local music. It’s a unique model, with stores functioning in a kind of symbiosis with the city’s wider independent music ecosystem.
“The record stores in Melbourne are unique because they are very much focused on being a place to gather and have a real sense of community, as opposed to just a place where you just buy vinyl,” says Bridget Small, radio presenter, record collector and account manager at vinyl pressing plant Program Records.
“The attitude here is really positive–most record store owners will give you the time of day,” she adds. “It can be extremely intimidating stepping into these spaces, but when I just started getting into buying vinyl I was encouraged and made to feel welcome by the stores I visited. This is the difference between someone, especially a young girl of 19 or so, embracing their passion or giving up altogether.”
Each week, there are dozens of in-stores happening in record stores across Melbourne— sometimes big names but, more often, young emerging artists.
In 2019, Zambian rapper Sampa The Great literally stopped traffic on Gertrude Street when she launched her Australian Music Prize-winning record The Return at Northside Records. That same year, Amyl and The Sniffers dropped their debut album with a now-iconic free ‘all ages’ in-store at Paradise Records. And just this year, recently reformed cult garage band Eddy Current Suppression Ring played a surprise gig at Licorice Pie. All of these artists could theoretically sell out headline shows, but choose to return to the spaces that supported them from day dot.
Let’s get physical: The rise and rise of vinyl
Since the mid-2010s, vinyl and physical media sales have been on the rise globally. It seems in a world of streaming and downloads, people want something more tangible. Just as Boomers were re-embracing the records of their youth—“A few years ago, I couldn’t shift a copy of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours for AUD$5 (USD3.5), and now I sell a few every week,” says Reitman—younger generations of fans wanted to own something to show for their fandom. In turn, vinyl became more mainstream, with most major pop albums getting exclusive LP releases.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, this trend has gone turbo. No-one is running a record store to become the next Wolf of Wallstreet––it’s a pursuit of passion and the margins are small, sometimes non-existent. But there are more people buying vinyl now than there were even six years ago.
“Hands down, Covid changed the way people bought music,” says Reitman. “A lot of stores had online presences and so people started to spend money on a record, because they couldn’t go down to the local pub and see a band. It’s a habit that has stuck here and around the world, where unfortunately many live music venues are struggling, while vinyl keeps selling.”
On many shop counters in Melbourne, you’ll find a ‘Diggin’ Melbourne’ map, an almost-exhaustive list of the city’s independent vinyl stores.
“Covid shone the light on the private space,” agrees Gill. “And then people spent a lot more time at home and thinking about what that meant—young kids and old folks.” During Melbourne’s two-year lockdowns, Northside Records was able to deliver records to customers, and this single (albeit socially distanced) interaction or conversation with Gill was often the only one they’d have with someone outside their home for weeks.
“I formed different relationships with people, because I was the only freak they ever saw, and sometimes you’d spend 20 minutes just talking and cracking gags,” he says. “I think this all gave the record store more of an important cultural significance in Melbourne—and it stayed like this afterwards. Made our stores into hubs where people wanted to hang.”
This shouldn’t really come as a surprise. As streaming services churn out AI ripoffs and tweak algorithms to ensure their users literally think less about the music they are listening to, record stores offer something that—in 2026—feels wildly revolutionary: Human recommendations and interactions; thoughtful, physical connection with music and the people that make it.
On many shop counters in Melbourne, you’ll find a ‘Diggin’ Melbourne’ map, an almost-exhaustive list of the city’s independent vinyl stores. Chris Gill and graphic designer Rex from Blisterfinger have been producing them for the last decade, releasing a new one annually just in time for Record Store Day.
It’s a labor of love. Every year, Chris rings all the shops to have a chat, check-in and see what stores might have opened or closed. “Our [record store] music community is pretty close, for the most part,” says Reitnan. “I was on the phone with Chris Gill just an hour ago having a chin wag,” he laughs. “We all talk to each other. We help each other.”
Gill agrees: “I think you have to become quite selfless to do this––and that’s maybe why it works here; because you realize you’re just an ant in the sand pile of the desert of groove. It’s humbling. You just keep getting up and doing your thing, sharing the music.”
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Sarah is a writer, broadcaster and wanderer. She has spent most of her life as a music journalist, but loves writing about adventures of all kinds and interviewing interesting humans. She currently lives on the Bellarine Peninsula in Australia.
