More than a decade ago, independent record store owners kickstarted a day to celebrate their groovy enterprise and keep analog music alive.
This Record Store Day on Saturday, new store openings are still on the horizon as a physical media renaissance emerges.
One of those openings came through this year with Brooksville-based Grandaddy Records & Vintage. Tyler Mauriello launched the store on Feb. 1 alongside his partner, Sydney Brown.
Mauriello said he fell in love with the quaint downtown vacancy on Broad Street and constantly imagined how it could be “the coolest little record shop.”
When Mauriello saw a “For Rent” sign plastered out front, that was his calling.
“I was like, ‘No freaking way,’ and that was what really kickstarted it,” Mauriello told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.
Mauriello was already buying and selling collections online. So, opening the shop came naturally to him, though he wasn’t sure how Brooksville would treat it, as it’s a small and “sleepy” town.
Grandaddy sells a variety of vinyl records, CDs and cassettes alongside a selection of vintage fashion, which Brown manages.
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Grandaddy Records & Vintage
“The community aspect—seeing how people have taken to it—has been super, super cool,” Mauriello told CL.
And for Mauriello, there’s also beauty in the tangible, interactive elements of physical media.
“It’s almost like having a timeline of where you’ve gone musically with your tastes,” Mauriello said.
“It turns it back into a ritual, something to be cherished a little bit more than just throwing something on your phone and kind of letting it be that background noise.”
Mauriello said that for Record Store Day, the store will do a raffle entry for a $100 gift card with each purchase and a buy-two-get-one-free sale for budget bins.
Here’s an updated list of record stores across the Tampa Bay area. Some are home to extensive collections of different genres, and others offer a smaller, curated inventory—including used and older records for the vintage lover.
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This article appears in Apr. 09 – 15, 2026.