Steamboat Limerick are gearing up for a massive Record Store Day tomorrow

Now into their third year of celebrating Record Store Day, Steamboat will have a huge selection of limited, predominantly unreleased vinyl recordings and special edition re-releases available tomorrow (April 21). But, the owners stress, what's more important is that this day will be "a toast to original music and its roots - the humble record store - a place where people’s love of music is often created, stirred and nurtured."

Helping them out tomorrow will be some of Ireland's top acts. The phenomenal Little Hours are the main event on Saturday, set to perform in store from around 12:30.

Before that, the store will open from 9am with Pity of the Sea first on stage, followed by Windings, Zombie Picnic, Flag Listeners, Paddy Hanna and Inner City Radio.

And just for all those who can't make it, Steamboat have teaming up that most renowned of music magazines, Hot Press, to live stream the full event on Facebook. See facebook.com/Steamboat.ie for full details.

_image2_

The Steamboat Story

Steamboat's tale has been one of music-loving, entrepreneurship and community spirit. In an era of record stores closing down, Steamboat was created from the closure of HMV in Limerick in 2013. Owner, Mark Carey, realising Limerick would be without a record store after HMV’s departure decided to add one to his instrument store. “It was an easy decision for us, a city without a record store would be a place I wouldn’t want people to live in. It’s inherently important for the creation and promotion of new original music. It’s inherently important for us as an instrument store, the less people explore music, the less people that take up playing and in the long term our business would suffer. The less music on display in the city, the more the arts and culture of Limerick would suffer which has a knock on effect to the prosperity of the city.”

“Steamboat’s business plan for the record store division was quite simple, we run the record store as a community goodwill project, it accounts for less than 15% of our business, it was never set up to make us millionaires. We wanted to achieve things other than financial goals with it. It has increased our contact with music lovers through out the region, allowed us to build our network of musicians locally and nationally, promote music and playing music to people that hadn’t considered playing an instrument. That is what we’re about right now, pushing music on as many people as possible."

Record Store Day will be celebrated across Ireland on April 21.