Recordville’s Northampton Record Fair returns April 11

A look at a previous Recordville Northampton Record Fair.
Photo credit: Recordville, Justin Cohen

NORTHAMPTON — Music lovers from all over can find their favorite artists in one place during an entire day this spring.

Local and regional record dealers and collectors from around the Northeast will travel to Northampton High School with thousands of vinyl records and CDs for the public’s digging pleasure during the Northampton Record Fair on Saturday, April 11.

The event is presented by Recordville.

Early admission tickets are $10 and available between 9-11 a.m. An early admission ticket includes an additional ticket for the event’s 11 a.m. raffle, and the first 300 attendees will receive a free Recordville tote bag for their shopping. Raffle items will include three $50 shopping sprees people can use for the fair, as well as prizes from sponsors like Spin That Records in Springfield and Electric Eye Records in Florence.

General admission is $5 and is available from 11 a.m. to the fair’s closing at 5 p.m. All tickets will be sold at the door on the day of the event.

Originally known as the Northampton Record Fair, Recordville was founded by Justin Cohen and his wife, Janice Chaka, in 2015. The two wanted to spread their love for vinyls and discovering new music after they noticed a gap in large-scale record fairs. Cohen was at one point running the WMUA Record Fair during the mid to late 2000s while he worked for the station. After a stint in Somerville, he eventually returned to Western Massachusetts around 2015 and looked to revive the event under a new umbrella after noticing a void in the space.

“It became pretty apparent that the station has made a lot of changes, and they weren’t going to keep doing the record fair. Though I wasn’t running it at the time, I realized this community really needs a record fair,” said Cohen. “That was the inspiration for holding the first one in 2015.”

The first Northampton Record Fair was held in 2015 at the World War II Club and quickly became a popular community event that eventually migrated to Union Station as the new home base. Cohen said they began hosting the event two to three times a year until the COVID-19 pandemic paused their efforts.

During this time, Cohen said they had to take a break from the annual fairs, but they were always motivated to bring it back because of the demand for one in the community.

“Though I had run the fairs at UMass [University of Massachusetts Amherst], and I used to run a flea market, and I ran record stores in the Boston area, etc., this was definitely the biggest and most successful one I had run, which was a super surprise to me. Me realizing that, yeah, the community really, really wants this,” said Cohen.

The Northampton Record Fair would not return until March 2024, but when it did, things were “full steam ahead,” according to Cohen. In need of a new venue, Cohen and Chaka settled on the Three County Fairgrounds at that time.

Last year, Cohen said he and Chaka started branching out of the Western Massachusetts region to hold a fair in Cambridge. With the expanded effort, the organization that was formerly known as the Northampton Record Fair officially became Recordville.

Cohen said this upcoming record fair will be inside Northampton High School for the first time. He added that they anticipate 42 vendors on 75 tables, and 10 of those tables will showcase Cohen’s own offerings.

“I have a lot of records, but there will be a lot more records at the event that I own. Record dealers from all over the place are coming in. For this show, people tend to bring their top game. There’s always a wide mix of old stuff, new stuff, inexpensive, super expensive, every genre you can think of,” added Cohen.

He shared that, along with records for sale, there will also be a lot of CD options and other memorabilia available for sale from both independent record dealers and stores. There will also be live DJ performances throughout the fair, providing a mix of different music styles during the day.

“I grew up with records, I love records. I’m also a DJ, and I spin records. So, this is definitely an event not just for people like me, but certainly also [for] people who aren’t like me. That’s very much where it came from. It’s something I wanted to happen because I wanted it to happen, and for the people like me who like this and who are shopping and meeting other people who are also into the same stuff,” said Cohen. “I like records, and I like listening to records, but I also like the act of shopping for records and finding new things that I don’t know, and never knowing what’s going to be in the bin.”

Cohen said that the fair always draws a great mix of people of all ages and backgrounds who are looking to buy and discover more physical copies of music.

“Any version of anything that gets music into people’s lives is good. There’s so much music that’s on vinyl and nowhere else. There’s so much music on CD and nowhere else. And there’s so much music that’s digital and not on physical media, so I don’t try to rule anything out because it cuts off large swaths of music that exist that is the only way you can find it,” said Cohen. “We are excited to keep it going. It’s surprising and continually exciting that the Northampton fair is growing bigger and bigger, and the community wants it to grow bigger and bigger.”