Shanachie Records

The term 'sales' is an anachronism. Today, it's about streaming and ancillary income."

- BY ROBERT BAIRD

Randall Grass, general manager at Shanachie Entertainment, has seen many changes since joining Shanachie Records in 1980. After uttering the statement above, he's happy to admit that while streaming and merch sales predominate in the music business today, there is one very powerful and profitable new surprise: vinyl. It's why Shanachie, an independent label based in Newton, New Jersey, has just launched a vinyl reissue series.

Shanachie's catalog is extremely diverse, covering a wide range of genres from Celtic traditional and reggae to world music, and more recently, smooth jazz. The label's initial group of releases includes titles by Celtic trad bands Solas and Planxty, which date from the label's earliest days, and Mississippi John Hurt's 1928 Sessions, an album from Shanachie's invaluable trove of catalog releases from Yazoo Records, which they acquired in 1987. Completing the initial group of releases are a pair of new compilations, assembled by Grass, of music by reggae notables Lee "Scratch" Perry and Augustus Pablo. Released earlier in 2025, this new vinyl is being pressed in Cleveland at Gotta Groove Records.

"When we started out, it was mainly LPs and cassettes, then CDs, and now it's streaming," Grass explained. "There's good and bad. The good is with streaming, things live on forever. They are never out of stock. And for catalog, it's great! Even if it's only fractions of a cent per stream, when you have a large catalog like we do, it just keeps generating income every month, and there's no such thing as returns.