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

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.

"The downside, of course, is that the payout per stream is very small. Unless you generate a very good number, you’re not seeing much. Also, the massive amount of stuff that’s available on streaming platforms makes it very difficult to get attention for a new release. Going back to physical, there was a certain level of predictability. If you had an artist with a certain fanbase, and you got the records into the stores, people would see it and buy it. That’s not operative in the streaming world."

Shanachie is an ever-evolving case study of an independent record label that has ridden the winds of change, survived, and even at times prospered since its founding, by Dan Collins and Richard Nevins in 1975. Along the way, the label has become a force, sometimes a predominant force, in several of the niche music genres mentioned above. The label catalog, which now, according to Grass, "numbers over hundreds of titles and thousands of tracks," contains masterpieces by Planxty, Silly Wizard, The Mighty Diamonds, Judy Mowatt, and a reissue of the landmark South African compilation The Indestructible Beat of Soweto.

"It’s like the blind man and the elephant," Grass said. "Shanachie doesn’t have this one label identity that you can promote. Some people still think of us as a reggae label. Others think of us as primarily an Irish label, and still others only know us from smooth jazz. When one market has gotten more difficult, we have these other niches we can go to."

While most of today’s Shanachie new releases feature gospel, R&B, or smooth jazz from artists like Najee, Norman Brown, and Keko Matsui, the label is most famous, at least among fans of early Americana and blues, for its Yazoo bounty. Richard Nevins, the founder and still president of Shanachie, was a friend of Yazoo’s founder, the colorful J. Nicholas Perls. Both men were once part of a circle of 78 collectors who saved much classic Americana from oblivion. Over time, Nevins became very skilled at the esoteric art of transferring 78s to recording tape, in collaboration with Perls. "When Perls died in 1987, he wanted Shanachie to have Yazoo based on his relationship with Richard and his feeling that it would be treated with the love and care that it deserved," Grass reflected. "We regard it as preserving history, and attention to sound quality is really crucial."

I was told Nevins no longer does interviews, but Grass relayed a few questions to him by email. On the question of sound, Nevins said, "Recordings made to one standard can’t simply be transferred to another media that use another standard. 78s weren’t recorded to an RIAA curve. Therefore, in remastering, compensation must be made for the difference. Everyone who was involved in releasing LP or CD releases based on old 78s was involved in solving that problem, including me. One key was using midrange boosts."

Hopeful if not bullish on the prospects for Shanachie’s new vinyl-reissue program, Grass and the label he runs have made yet another transition in the ever-changing business of selling music. "The vinyl phenomenon has taken root much deeper and longer than we thought," admitted Grass, who started out his career in music with vinyl. "It surprises me that it’s continued to grow. And it’s grown beyond that initial circle of vinylheads. The younger generation that never experienced vinyl in the first place finds it very cool. If you have an artist who knows how to sell merch, that helps, because then the LP is an artifact people want.

"Finally, in an increasingly digital world, it’s something tangible, something you can hold in your hand."