Records & Music

Howard Street, Nambour. Bad Habit stocks hardcore and punk vinyl — pre-orders on Encierro and Oratory 7-inches sit alongside second-hand records, figurines, and band merch available for free appraisal. They also run the Nambour Black Market, a recurring event pulling in regional bands, film photographers, and video game dealers. The kind of shop that puts on a horror movie and cranks the stereo on a slow Saturday.

Vic Aird opened Beatdisc in 1995 off the back of a DJ career and an overflow of second-hand CDs. Thirty years on, it occupies the Queensland Arcade on Church Street Mall — new vinyl, used vinyl, CDs, cassettes, turntables — staffed by people who've been here long enough to actually know the stock. Official record store for Laneway Festival since 2023.

Matt "Footy" Horvath spent five years at Big Star Records before it closed in 2010 — then opened Clarity on Pulteney Street the same year to fill the gap. The stock runs deep across punk, jazz, hip-hop and metal, with a strong local shelf. In 2021, the shop doubled in size by absorbing the space next door.

A records shop at 301 Rossmoyne Street in Thornbury, Melbourne.

Open in Blackburn since 1976 and now trading out of a larger warehouse on Railway Road. The stock comes almost entirely over the counter — collections bought from the public for cash — so the racks turn over weekly and prices stay low. This is the branch to dig at for hard rock and metal, and it's where the store's reputation for rare pressings was built. Vinyl, CDs, DVDs, cassettes and music books.

A Newtown institution for crate diggers specialising in punk, post-punk, and Australian indie. Known for Punk, post-punk, Australian indie vinyl. Located on the eclectic King Street strip in Newtown, a hub of independent retail and creative culture in Sydney's Inner West. Worth a visit for vinyl enthusiasts and music lovers hunting for rare finds and quality pressings.

A record shop at 1/117 Leura Mall in the Blue Mountains, trading in second-hand and original vinyl pressings, including Japanese presses, across rock, jazz, soul and funk. Cassettes and t-shirts round out the shelves, and records not in stock can be sourced at no extra cost. The shop also sets up at Glenbrook Markets on the first and third Saturdays of each month.

Down a laneway in Fortitude Valley, a shop the size of a single retail unit holds a catalogue that runs past 70,000 physical recordings once the off-site archive is counted in, spanning vinyl, CD, cassette and shellac. It opened in 2022, built by a former freelance music journalist who spent the previous decade writing for outlets including Music Feeds and Happy Mag before deciding the more useful role was custodian rather than critic. Since then the collection has absorbed entire archives that would otherwise have been broken up and sold off piecemeal, including stock from a 150,000-item CD collection and the inventory of Record Exchange after it closed in 2024. It keeps deliberately limited public hours, open only Friday and Saturday, treating the shop less as a retail proposition than as an active preservation project with a shopfront attached. It has consigned pieces to the Institute of Modern Art and maintains ties to community radio station 4ZZZ, the kind of cultural infrastructure a shop like this ends up quietly holding together. For collectors, it is less a browse than an excavation, one that rewards genuine patience over a quick flip through the New Arrivals crate.

Greville Records in Prahran stocks new pressings alongside secondhand finds — a 1972 Japanese Ike & Tina Turner double-LP here, a 1985 Benelux Anna Domino 12-inch there. Record Store Day leftovers go straight online and onto the shelves. The kind of shop where the used section does the real talking.

Chris Crouch came from Polyester Records and the Candle label, gutted a former travel bookshop on Smith Street, and filled it with what he actually likes: design and art books across ten genres, a thousand-odd new records from jazz to electronica, art prints, and the sort of objects nobody else is importing. Lonely Planet gave up trying to categorise it — art store, bookshop, gallery of wonderful things. Open seven days, 11 to 5.

Warilla's answer to the crate-diggers of inner-city Sydney, Harbourside Records runs a tight physical shop on George Street alongside an online catalogue that spans Nina Simone reissues, Mobb Deep originals, and the *Shrek* soundtrack on wax. Every record ships in cardboard mailers with a fresh outer sleeve included — a small detail that signals they know their customer. Local pickup available.

Redcliffe's vinyl outpost in a strip-shop on Oxley Avenue stocks new records only — no second-hand crates — alongside turntables, speakers, cleaning gear, and band merch. The range runs from Lorna Shore and Amity Affliction through to Rosalía and Ethel Cain, with Record Store Day exclusives landing regularly. Powderfinger's 25th-anniversary *Odyssey Number Five* sitting beside a glitter-vinyl Taylor Swift 7" tells you most of what you need to know.

A record shop anchoring the main street of a regional town is rare enough; this one is run by an independent label, Melodic Entertainment Group, which set up its retail arm here rather than in a capital. The racks carry rare and classic vinyl alongside new pressings and CDs spanning the decades, with rock tees, posters, patches and the usual counter-culture ephemera on the walls. It is a listed Record Store Day store and hosts the occasional in-store performance. For East Gippsland, where the nearest comparable shop is a long drive west, it functions as a genuine music hub, a place to dig through crates rather than scroll a screen, and evidence that a serious record culture can hold on well outside the cities.

Vic Flierl has run Mr V Music on Semaphore Road since 2001, after fifteen years behind the counter at Big Star — long enough that most regulars just call him Mr V. The crates are mainly secondhand vinyl and CDs across every genre and price point, with new releases mixed in, a footpath rack of $5 discs, and the odd box of guitar picks and drumsticks. He buys collections for cash, runs the twice-yearly Semaphore Record Fair, and handles the record stall at WOMADelaide.

On Keira Street, Music Farmers runs deeper than a record shop. Alongside new and used vinyl — Coltrane, Sonic Youth, Coleman, Depeche Mode — it operates several independent labels including Farmer & The Owl and High Beam, and offers a vinyl flattening service that alone sets it apart. Record Store Day exclusives and shop pressings round out a stock that rewards the digger.

On Gertrude Street, a shop the width of a single shopfront has spent more than two decades restocking a very specific corner of music: soul, funk, reggae, disco, house and hip-hop, sold on vinyl to the near-exclusion of everything else. It opened in 2002 under an owner with direct connections across international soul and funk labels, which shows in the shelves: new 45s and rare pressings brought in from overseas sit next to local releases the shop has actively sought out rather than waited to be pitched. It functions as an archive for home-grown black music as much as a retailer, stocking Naarm's future soul scene, First Nations hip-hop and heritage Australian jazz alongside the imports, treating local pressings as worth the same shelf space as anything shipped in. In-store listening posts let customers cue up a record before committing, an old-fashioned courtesy increasingly rare even among specialist stores. The shop also runs its own label and hosts in-store performances, extending its reach past retail into the scene it draws stock from. For DJs and collectors chasing a specific genre rather than browsing generally, it remains one of the few Melbourne stores built entirely around that logic.

Selling records since 1991, Rare Records launched Australia's first online store in 1997 — before Spotify was a concept. The stock runs from graded vinyl across rock, jazz, funk and beyond, to signed tour posters and backstage passes. Every item is photographed individually, front and back. Voted Melbourne's number one record store, it now ships from Point Cook.

On the Surry Hills-Darlinghurst border, Steph runs a tight electronic and DJ-specialist shop with a broader spread of LPs — rock, jazz, hip hop, reggae, funk — plus $10 digging crates that don't make it online. The repair side is serious: Technics 1200/1210 servicing, vinyl de-warping via a four-hour disc flattener, and imported, reconditioned OG decks converted to 240V by a licensed technician.

143 York Street in the CBD, Red Eye stocks new releases alongside vinyl reissues — current shelves hold everything from Sunn O)))'s first album in seven years to a silver-vinyl repress of *Confessions on a Dancefloor*. The kind of shop where Courtney Barnett's latest sits next to a deluxe Little Feat remaster. Sydney's most reliably stocked independent record store.

On King Street, in the stretch of Newtown that still resists chain retail, bins run deep with vinyl sorted by genre rather than mood: punk and metal on one wall, funk, soul and jazz on another, a dedicated section for Australian and New Zealand pressings that most stores would fold into 'local music' and forget. The shop has traded here since 2002, buying and selling both new and secondhand records, with a lean toward independent and underground labels rather than whatever charts. A shelf of secondhand books sits near the counter, an afterthought that has become its own small destination. The store publishes its own zine, Presser, handed out in-store and posted online, a habit that belongs to a slower kind of retail than same-day delivery allows. The secondhand stock is graded rather than sold sight-unseen, a basic discipline that matters more than most shops bother to admit. It functions as both a shop and an informal archive of what Sydney's underground scenes have pressed to vinyl over two decades, restocked weekly rather than curated once and left static.

Rerun sits in the Renaissance Arcade off Rundle Mall, where John buys, sells and exchanges one of Adelaide's largest retro-vinyl collections. Stock runs from 50s rock'n'roll and rockabilly through 70s punk and new wave to reggae, soundtracks and Australian pressings, with rare and collectible records across 7-inch, LP and box-set formats alongside new releases. The shop traded at Norwood's Orange Lane Markets and the East End before settling here in 2010.

Rock Ape Records keeps what it bills as North Queensland's largest range of new and rare vinyl, on Sturt Street in Townsville. The racks run from jazz to rock and roll, alongside CDs, cassettes, and a horror sideline of DVDs, masks and patches. It opens six days a week, and carries the same stock through its online shop.

Scott and Glenyce Johnson have run Rockaway Records inside Westfield Carindale since 1992 — a sister business to Rockaway Records LA, owned by Scott's brothers in Los Angeles for forty-plus years. Specialty is import, rare, promo, and deleted vinyl LPs and 45s, alongside 20,000-plus new and 5,000-plus used CDs. The longest-serving independent record store in Brisbane, holding ground in a shopping centre that swallows independents. Pop culture and collectables alongside the music.

Brisbanes iconic record store in the Valley, serving music lovers since 1975. Known for New releases, Australian indie, and an enormous back catalogue. Set in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane's entertainment and creative arts precinct known for its vibrant nightlife and cultural scene. Worth a visit for vinyl enthusiasts and music lovers hunting for rare finds and quality pressings.

Since 1997, this Daw Park shop on Goodwood Road has been shifting vinyl, CDs, cassettes, 45s, and music DVDs across every genre worth caring about — rock, jazz, funk, hip-hop, classical, and beyond. Pre-loved and new imported stock sit alongside rarities and collectors' items. They buy collections too, cash on the spot.

Suffragette Records stocks one thing: music by women. Lauren and Oberon Carter run the Battery Point shop with their three daughters, shelving new and pre-loved vinyl, cassettes and CDs entirely by female artists — pop and folk through to jazz, hip-hop and a Produced by Women shelf. Pre-loved records are cleaned and regraded before they go out, sleeves replaced where needed. The Carters pitch it as a snob-free room rather than a collectors' gatekeep, and run record clubs for people building a collection from scratch.

Directly opposite Katoomba station, this record shop has been trading vinyl since 1999 and treats the format as something to be maintained as well as collected. The bins run deep across rock, jazz, soul, blues, funk, reggae, folk, punk and the harder-to-file corners - soundtracks, world, classical, exotica - alongside 45s, ten-inch pressings, CDs and music books. A second strand of the business is hi-fi: refurbished amplifiers, turntables, cassette decks and speakers sit for sale, cartridges and styli are stocked, and audio repairs are carried out in-house. Staff are known for finding rare and out-of-print titles and for the condition of what they sell, and the shop actively buys quality collections and equipment. It reads less like a browse-and-go retailer than a working room for people who take listening seriously, a short walk from the tourist churn of Katoomba Street.

Opened in December 1978 after its founder grew tired of stores ignoring the records he wanted, Utopia has spent nearly five decades as Australia's specialist in metal and hard rock. The current Kent Street basement stocks over 20,000 items — vinyl, CDs, merch — and carries the faint glory of a place where Pantera once signed records and Slayer drew crowds of a thousand.