March 2014: Long Live Vinyl is founded by Ian Peel with Anthem Publishing. A veteran vinyl journalist, he’s written extensively on the subject for Spiral Scratch and Record Collector and in the 80s, Music Collector and DJ magazine (more than 250 consecutive issues) in the 90s, and The Times and The Guardian in the 00s and 10s. Long Live Vinyl kicks off on Facebook with “exclusive first play” videos of white label promos of 2014 Record Store Day releases.
July 2014: Two worldwide music magazines, Vintage Rock and Classic Pop, the latter also founded and edited by Ian Peel, feature double-page rounds-up of new record releases and reissues under the Long Live Vinyl brand.
November 2016: Issue one of the print edition of Long Live Vinyl hits newsstands worldwide. And causes an instant stir: it’s a magazine shaped like a vinyl record. 12″ x 12″ pages and featuring interviews with legends of the vinyl scene ranging from Roger Dean to Steve Davis. Interesting.
January 2017: Long Live Vinyl sponsors the Art Vinyl Awards for excellence in sleeve design. The first prize on the night is taken by Matthew Cooper for The Last Shadow Puppets’ Everything You’ve Come to Expect.
April 2017: Long Live Vinyl releases its first record – and becomes one of the first newsstand magazine to cover-mount a flexi disc since the heady days of Flexipop! magazine. The ‘Pioneers of Electronica’ flexi (check it out on Discogs) features a classic track from Thomas Leer on Side One, and a brand new track from The Residents on Side Two. It’s square, yellow, with gold lettering, and we couldn’t be prouder.
May 2017: Gary Walker joins as Editor of the print version of Long Live Vinyl (Ian Peel moves to Editor-at-Large) and takes the magazine from strength to strength. He brings in top-class writers including Gareth Murphy and Pete Paphides. He takes the design and presentation to a higher level and roots the magazine in an A&R policy that would leave most indie labels quaking in their boots.
June 2017: We celebrate the 50th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper with four different covers of the same edition of Long Live Vinyl. Issue Four had the Fab Four – John, Paul, George and Ringo – each in Pepper regalia, the full set of which is now massively collectable.
July 2017: It’s like history repeating: in the same way that John & Yoko’s Two Virgins sleeve needed to be censored with a brown paper bag, Issue 5 of Long Live Vinyl’s print edition has to be covered in a brown paper bag when it goes on sale in WH Smith, thanks to Ian Peel’s cover feature on The 40 Most Controversial Sleeves in Music History.
November 2017: We’re very proud to win our first PPA Award from the Independent Publishers Association – thanks to contributor Gareth Murphy who storms the Writer Of The Year category.
January 2018: FAC this. The magazine takes over the newsstand with another highly collectable cover (a four-way selection, again) for Issue 10’s Factory Records special.
October 2019: We’re shortlisted for PPA Independent Publisher Awards, in the category of Commercial Partnership of the Year, thanks to our lavish and detailed one-off publication celebrating all the special releases for Record Store Day. The world’s first Official RSD Long List is another Long Live Vinyl innovation, and two subsequent editions have since been published.
August 2020: After more than 40 print editions, Long Live Vinyl pauses the monthly printing press and its website becomes the biggest and best resource for vinyl fans, collectors, shoppers and listeners this side of your turntable.
September 2020: we top 3,000 followers on Twitter, and get retweeted by John Lennon‘s estate (twice!). Facebook is still our biggest platform, with more than 15,000 followers.
Long live Long Live Vinyl!
Issue One reader photo by Mark Wheeler at TNT-Audio UK