other-music-documentary

Other Music documentary hitting streaming services this month

The Other Music documentary, which tells the story of the much-loved, much-missed NYC independent record store (which closed in 2016), had a quick digital premiere back in April to celebrate what should’ve been Record Store Day weekend, but is now getting wide release, hitting on-demand streaming services like iTunes, Amazon Prime, and Google Play on August 25. That date is also just ahead of the first of three “Record Store Day Drops,” which happens August 29.

The documentary includes interviews with The National‘s Matt Berninger, Le Tigre‘s JD Samson, James Chance, Interpol‘s Daniel Kessler, Yeah Yeah YeahsBrian Chase, Vampire Weekend‘s Ezra Koenig, Magnetic Fields maestro Stephin Merritt, TV on the Radio‘s Tunde Adebimpe, Mogwai‘s Stuart Braithwaite, Dean Wareham (Galaxie 500/Luna), actors Jason Schwartzman and Benicio Del Toro, and more. Here’s a bit of my review from April:

What the film does best is show how record stores could be a community, where clerks got to know their customer base, and how person-to-person recommendations offer more than an algorithm ever could (not yet at least). Back to those little cards, one of my favorite sequences in the documentary is when they bring a few of those cards to life, animating them and using the voices of the clerks who wrote them. When the staff talk about records they loved at Other Music, you can see the sparkle in their eyes, the passion — and that made me miss it the most.

You can watch the Other Music trailer below.

other-music-documentary