Published
Wed, Nov 8, 2017, 10:20
- The two websites' research has yielded insights into the locations of record shops around the world.
Discogs and its sister site VinylHub have collected a wealth of information about the world's record shops.
Like Discogs' own well-known music database, the findings are based on community input, which shows the United States as having the most record shops by far, with 1482, followed by the United Kingdom with 537 and Germany with 453. The three cities with the most stores are Tokyo with 93 (more than half of the 158 in Japan), Berlin with 87 and London with 79. In the US, the top three cities are New York (47), Chicago (30) and Los Angeles (29).
Berlin is also home to the densest cluster of shops in the world, with 46 to be found within a kilometer of each other. The most remote business, meanwhile, is a CD store located in a market in Nuku'alofa, the capital of the Polynesian country Tonga, that's nearly 2000 kilometers from the closest shop.
In terms of shop density based on number of inhabitants, the small island country of Palau, with three stores and a population of 21,186, ranks number one; Estonia (17), Sweden (119) and Norway (57) top the list for nations with a million or more inhabitants.
Find out more at the Discogs blog.
Read our 2015 Roundtable feature with the people behind four of Tokyo's best-loved shops: JET SET, Diskunion, Technique and Lighthouse.