What are you going to do when you retire?

Stacey Agecoutay has been getting that question a lot lately.

His 36-year career in financial advisory comes to an end on December 31, 2026, and he already knows the answer.

There will be almost 30,000 records in one room in Toronto on October 25.

Which raises an obvious question.

Why would anyone bother?

We can find almost any record we want without leaving the couch. Search for the album. Check the pressing. Compare the price. Click buy.

Done.

But that's not really digging.

Aaron Keele and Akim Boldireff know something about that.

Guest feature by Sid James: This special feature comes from Salford punk archivist Sid James, who shares his story in his own words.

I grew up in Salford, and some of my earliest memories are of being at my grandparents' house in the middle of summer. I can still hear the Ramones drifting down from my Aunt Ray's bedroom upstairs. The sun was coming through the windows, everyone was in a good mood, and Joey's voice just fit the moment. Looking back, I realise that was where everything began.

Manchester has always been the centre of my life. I honestly think it's one of the greatest cities to be a musician in the UK.

When I look back on my own life, it feels like The Smiths are the soundtrack to every high and low. Cemetery Gates is about the cemetery where members of my family are buried. Still Ill became the soundtrack to my first heartbreak. Those songs aren't just music to me. They're places, memories and pieces of who I am.
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I ended up connecting with Vinyl Vibes after commenting on one of their Manchester posts. I liked the way they talked about the city and the music that came from it, so when they asked if I'd share my story, it felt like the right place to tell it.

The Hamilton Record Show returns to Bridgeworks on September 27. Last time we asked why vinyl still matters. The answers went far beyond the records.

Last time the Hamilton Record Show came around, I asked what seemed like a fairly simple question:
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Nobody needs vinyl anymore. So why does it still matter so much?

We can carry millions of songs in our pockets. We don't need to drive across Hamilton, flip through crates, inspect sleeves or wonder whether the record we've just found is the pressing we think it is.
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And yet on Sunday, September 27, collectors will once again walk into Bridgeworks and do exactly that.
Since writing that original story, I think I've started to understand why.

Not because I came up with a better answer.

Because collectors started giving me theirs.

Music discovery in the streaming era is everywhere - and nowhere at the same time. There has never been more music available, yet fewer moments where it actually lands. Every week brings thousands of new releases pushed through algorithms, playlists, and recommendation feeds competing for attention. But the more access we gain, the harder it becomes to feel anything at all.
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Music discovery isn’t broken because of access - it’s broken because of attention.

One night in 2022, an algorithm did something it’s supposed to do all the time. It introduced me to a band I had never heard of: THUS LOVE.

I wasn’t searching for anything. I wasn’t digging through recommendations. I wasn’t even paying attention. The song just appeared - and it cut through everything else.

Moody, minimal, strangely magnetic. I didn’t skip it. I didn’t scroll past it. I just stayed with it. That doesn’t happen often anymore.

That single moment turned into more listening. Then curiosity. Then a trip to Sonic Boom in Toronto where I found their debut album Memorial. Then deeper listening. Then writing about them. Eventually, I was even talking directly with the band’s manager. Even my very first post on the Vinyl Vibes Instagram was THUS LOVE — so this is a band I’ve always felt passionate about.
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That chain of events matters - because it almost never happens that cleanly. That is what music discovery in the streaming era looks like when it actually works.

Most of the time, it doesn’t.

Read the full story here: When THUS LOVE found me.

I bought Definitely Maybe on CD at Cheapies in Hamilton in 1994.

More than 30 years later, I finally got to see Oasis live when the reunion reached Toronto in 2025.
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I wasn't sure we'd ever get Oasis back in the first place.

Now they're doing it again.

Oasis Live ’27 will take the band through the UK, mainland Europe, the United States and Ireland in 2027, with 38 stadium shows stretching from Glasgow in May to four nights at Knebworth in September.

Richard Ashcroft will join Oasis as special guest throughout the tour.
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Here are the dates, ticket information and a few ways to turn an Oasis show into something bigger.

Some Christmas gifts are forgotten by January.

Music has a habit of doing something different.

A record can introduce someone to an artist they end up loving. A pair of speakers can change the way they hear a collection they already own. A concert ticket can become the night everyone is still talking about years later.

Sometimes the smallest gift can start something much bigger.

I know because it happened to me.

One Christmas, I received Everybody Digs Bill Evans. I had already discovered Evans through “Peace Piece,” but that record pulled me deeper into jazz. From there came Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Dave Brubeck and Oscar Peterson.
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It wasn't just another record under the tree.

​It was a small moment, but Hepner never forgot it.

And it helps explain something that sits at the heart of his work with the Hamilton Music Collective: children don't always know what they're interested in until somebody gives them the opportunity to find out.

Hamilton is where this story takes place. But the question could be asked in almost any city or town.

What happens when you give a child the chance to make music?

​A sailboat childhood, a forgotten demo, an unexpected piano and decades of hesitation led one woman to a decision: it was now or never.

Her name is Ariane.

Long before there was an album, there was the sea.

She grew up on the Magdalen Islands, surrounded by wind, water and changing seasons. Part of her childhood was spent on a sailboat, listening to cassettes as the boat moved through the water. At home, there were her parents' vinyl records.

Music was simply part of life.

​Ariane grew up in a creative household — her mother was a musician with twelve years of classical piano studies and played the accordéon — so instruments and sound were always around her.

“I was raised on a sailboat part of my life and grew up listening to cassettes and vinyls with my parents. So music, movement, landscape and memory have always been connected for me,” she says.

Ariane studied visual arts, wrote and sang, and was always creating something. In her twenties, she recorded a four‑song piano‑and‑voice demo with her vocal teacher in a home studio in Montreal.

She had written the songs herself, but didn’t know much about the music industry or what to do with the recordings.

So the demo stayed a demo.

Life got busy, and music moved into the background. She built a business, raised children and took on the responsibilities that came with both.

Then a piano came back into the picture.

And eventually, Ariane would take on a name most people don't know yet.
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ArianZ.
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This is how she got there.

​Joshua, better known to many as Breezy, has a somewhat unusual double life.

He’s a school principal in Phoenix. He works with students, families and teachers. He leads a community.
And he also runs Tracks In Wax, a Phoenix record store that has been part of the city’s music culture since 1982.

On the surface, the two worlds might seem completely unrelated.

Breezy sees it differently.

“Both are really about people, relationships, and community.”
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That idea sits at the heart of how he approaches Tracks In Wax — not as something he simply owns, but as something he has been entrusted to carry forward.

McMaster. Laurier. Guelph. Western. Brock. Queen’s. Trent. Different campuses. Different traditions. Different rhythms.

Yet this fall, they’ll all share something unexpected.

As the new academic year begins, another tradition quietly returns. It doesn’t appear on orientation schedules or campus maps, but for thousands of students across Ontario, it has become one of the first moments where campus life feels truly alive.

Before lectures begin, students gather around folding tables stacked with hundreds of vinyl records.

Coffee in one hand, backpack slipping off the other shoulder, they flip through Fleetwood Mac, Bob Dylan, The Smiths, Nirvana, The Stone Roses, Kendrick Lamar, Taylor Swift, and jazz classics.

Someone laughs after finding an album their dad won’t stop talking about. Someone else holds up a record and says, “You have to hear this.” A first‑year student buys their very first LP. A seasoned collector finds a pressing they didn’t expect to see on campus.

Suddenly, the conversation isn’t about classes or exams. It’s about music — and memories.

They Owe Us — Katzengold

I've been thinking a lot lately about how little music any of us actually hear.

There is so much of it out there, yet most of us spend our listening lives within a pretty small circle. The music we grew up with. The bands we know. The genres we feel comfortable with.

There's nothing wrong with that. I do it too.

But it made me wonder: how much music are we actually missing?

That question started with Michel Faber's Listen: On Music, Sound and Us.

Early in the book, Faber writes: “I’m not here to change your mind about Dusty Springfield or Shostakovich or Tupac Shakur or synthpop. I’m here to change your mind about your mind.”

That line stopped me.

I've started trying to do exactly that.

And Katzengold, the new album from They Owe Us, landed at exactly the right time.

I listened to it digitally first, then went back to it on vinyl. I wanted to give it some time before deciding what I thought.

That led me to Kristoffer Ragnstam.

Thunder Bay has always had a complicated relationship with distance.

It’s a long way from Toronto. A long way from most of the Canadian music industry. But for decades, people in this city have found ways to make music happen anyway.

Some of that history happened at a place called Crocks N Rolls.

The legendary Thunder Bay venue became a home for touring and local bands, with generations of people carrying memories of the shows that happened there. Sarah MacLachlan, The Tragically Hip, Rheostatics, 54-40, Cowboy Junkies, Big Sugar, Matthew Good, Sloan and Blue Rodeo all passed through its doors, alongside Canadian indie and punk acts such as D.O.A., Bourbon Tabernacle Choir, The Grapes of Wrath, Eric’s Trip and SNFU, to name a few.

The list is as vast as the highway they travelled.

For generations of Thunder Bay music fans, Crocks wasn’t simply another venue. It was the room.

Today, part of that same room is home to The Vinyl Frontier.
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Owner Chris Bernst knows exactly what the address means.

​The stage is gone. The records are still here.
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And the story of The Vinyl Frontier begins, somewhat improbably, with a storage problem.