Assessing My Home Town

By: Alex Bennett
Text Type: Blog
Date: 10-15-2023

       Local to Annapolis, Maryland, record store ‘KA-CHUNK!! Records’ is a quaint little shop nestled in the historic capital city just a block away from the Chesapeake Bay. This store is a fun experience with arcade machines, thrifted tees, comics, stickers, pins, and of course records. This spot serves, more than anything, as a spot for music lovers, both young and old, having both brand new releases in addition to original pressings of vinyl in their collection. It also acts as a bit of an interlude between the bustling restaurants and clothing shops also found in the area. Dads come in to find their favorite classics while teens chat with the owner about indie rock and pop. When it comes to promotional content and social media KA-CHUNK!! Records mainly sticks to Facebook and Instagram. Their digital presence is not bad for an independently owned record store with a small staff, predominantly run by one person, however there is definitely room for improvement.

       When you look up KA-CHUNK!! Records Annapolis Maryland the first sight to pop up is their Facebook which they use instead of a website. This already puts them at a disadvantage as websites streamline information that, when presented as posts on a Facebook page, can often get lost amongst other posts and pictures. Their purpose is to spread indie music between both longtime fans and new listeners. Their identity is based in the community of music as a point of contact for fans to the physical copies of their favorite albums. Despite their use of Facebook being slightly outdated, it does create a pretty conversational interaction with live updates on events being easily accessible, and album drops that will show up directly in your feed rather than being sought after in a website. Their consistency across platforms is almost exactly the same, with only some variation found in their story highlights on Instagram and memes posted as well. The strongest critique of both of these pages is the strong lack of accessibility found in the posts. A majority of the posts contain a picture of new albums and CDs, then a caption that goes on about an opinion on the albums featured without outlining exactly what is in the photo itself. For example a post will be of a band or record and the caption will say “everyone should check this out, etc..” without ever actually naming the band or album because it is featured in the image. However I will say because it is a local business whose socials are run by the owner there is a lot of personality in each post that makes the account super interactive.

       This goes into the overall tone of these two pages. The tone is really well rounded throughout their SM presence. It is clear that sharing, spreading, and discussing music is the most important thing and everything else is just for fun. KA-CHUNK!! Records is definitely an inclusive place as the music they feature is not specific to any one genre or type of person. Choosing Facebook and Instagram as platforms are perfect for their audience as the type of older, usually men, that are going in to find very specific collectible records are most likely to use Facebook and teens and college students that are on the search for something new are likely to use Instagram and interact with memes and stories. They could, however, primarily benefit from two things. The first is more graphic content, while it probably is not within their immediate abilities to make graphics considering their staff, it would be more interesting visually if there was more mixed media featured in their posts, having primarily photographic content can be boring and, at times, redundant. This also goes into the next improvement which is the aforementioned inaccessibility, not only would more accessible content be better for impaired individuals, having a mixture of types of captions, videos, graphics, and photographs would make the content more engaging by many.

       All things considered the tone is maintained and the message gets across in the way that KA-CHUNK!! Records posts online. While there are ways to improve, they have a pretty hearty following, 7.5k on Facebook and 3.8k on Instagram. While the engagement is not through the roof it is obvious that in person this shop is able to keep a constant flow of customers and general music conversation and enjoyment.