Guides · 🗺️ Things to do
Needle Down: Record Stores and Vinyl Culture in Fredericton
Fredericton’s vinyl scene is small but real. The anchor is Backstreet Records at 384 Queen Street, a downtown institution that founder Gordie Tufts sold to Halifax’s Taz Records in October 2024 after 44 years. Across the river, Casa-Dia Vinyl Records at 654 Riverside Drive digs deep into used wax. Record Store Day each April brings early lineups on Queen Street, and thrift bins at Value Village on Bishop Drive still cough up the occasional gem.
The scene at a glance: small, stubborn, and worth your Saturday
Let’s be honest up front: Fredericton is a one-main-record-store town, and that’s okay. This is a city of about 65,000 people, and the vinyl ecosystem matches the scale. There’s one full-service shop downtown with deep new and used stock, one used-heavy dig spot on the north side, a handful of thrift bins where patience occasionally pays off, and a loose community of collectors who trade online and show up in force one Saturday every April. If you’re arriving from Toronto or Montréal expecting a crawl of ten shops, recalibrate. If you’re here for an afternoon of unhurried crate digging where the person behind the counter actually knows your name by the third visit, you’re in exactly the right place.
What the scene lacks in square footage it makes up for in history. Fredericton has supported a dedicated record store on or near Queen Street continuously since the late 1980s, through the CD boom, the download crash, and the streaming era. That kind of persistence is rarer than it sounds. Plenty of bigger Canadian cities watched their legacy shops die in the 2000s and had to wait for the vinyl revival to grow new ones. Fredericton’s anchor store never left.
The scene has also seen real churn lately, so this guide leans on what could actually be verified in 2026. Backstreet Records changed hands in the fall of 2024. Tony’s Music Box, the beloved instrument shop that shared the same downtown corner for 50 years, closed at the end of November 2025. A second downtown record shop, Secondspin, came and went in the 2010s. Old directory listings for all of these still float around the internet, so treat any address you find on a random listings site with suspicion, including anything more than a year old. Better yet, treat this guide as your starting point and the stores’ own social feeds as the final word. For more on the broader retail landscape, our shopping hub covers the rest of the city.
Backstreet Records: the institution at 384 Queen Street
Backstreet Records at 384 Queen Street is the centre of gravity for vinyl in Fredericton, and it has one of the better origin stories in Maritime retail. Gordie Tufts opened the original Backstreet in Saint John in 1980, in the Ritchie Building on Princess Street. That first location was destroyed by arson on Christmas Eve 1982, and Tufts reopened on Germain Street two months later, which tells you something about the stubbornness baked into the brand. The Fredericton sister store followed about eight years after the original, and it has been a fixture of the Queen Street strip ever since, selling new and used vinyl, CDs, posters, and pop culture odds and ends, with staff who will happily chase down a special order.
The big recent news: in October 2024, after 44 years, Tufts sold Backstreet to Bob Russell of Taz Records, the Halifax institution founded in 1983 that runs three stores in the greater Halifax area. CBC covered the handover, and the encouraging parts are that the staff stayed on and the store kept its name and character. The practical upgrades are real too: Taz is a systems-driven operation, so the famously analogue Backstreet gained computerized inventory and a web presence. The new owners have mused publicly about eventually relocating the Fredericton store because of space constraints, but as of mid-2026 it remains at 384 Queen Street. Phone ahead at (506) 458-8832 if you’re making a special trip.
Posted hours run Monday to Wednesday 10am to 5pm, Thursday and Friday 10am to 6pm, Saturday 10am to 5pm, and Sunday noon to 4pm, though hours can shift, so check before you go. The store also runs an email newsletter through Substack with new-arrival roundups and event announcements, which is the single best way to follow the Fredericton vinyl scene from your inbox. Pair a browse with lunch on the same block; our eat and drink guide has plenty of options within a two-minute walk.
Casa-Dia Vinyl Records: the north side dig
Cross the river and you’ll find Fredericton’s other record shop: Casa-Dia Vinyl Records at 654 Riverside Drive on the north side. Owner Brad Schofield opened the storefront on July 14, 2018, after years of collecting, trading, and selling turntable parts and records online, plus a successful trial run as a vendor at the old Northside Market. Huddle profiled him at the opening, and his line about the city has aged well: “Fredericton loves records.” Schofield grew up in Miramichi in the 1990s, when Fredericton was the record-shopping destination for kids from smaller New Brunswick towns, and the shop feels like a tribute to that era of dedicated digging.
Where Backstreet balances new releases against its used wall, Casa-Dia’s heart is used vinyl: the business was built on secondhand records, supplemented by new pressings and reissues, along with turntable parts and vintage stereo accessories. That last part matters more than it sounds, because Fredericton has almost nowhere else to walk in and buy a replacement belt or a cartridge in person. If you inherit your uncle’s Dual turntable and a crate of scratched Anne Murray, this is the natural first stop for both problems.
One honest caution: Casa-Dia is a small independent shop, and small independent shops keep small independent hours. Its online presence comes and goes, and web directories disagree about details, so check the shop’s current social media or call before driving across the river with a wish list. That advice applies double if you’re visiting from out of town on a schedule. The upside of a shop this size is the conversation. Schofield opened the store explicitly hoping to build community through talk across the counter, and the best finds here tend to surface after you’ve mentioned what you’re actually hunting for.
Record Store Day: Fredericton’s one big vinyl holiday
Record Store Day is the one date on the calendar when Fredericton’s vinyl scene stops being quiet. The international event lands each April (the 2025 edition, the eighteenth, fell on Saturday, April 12), and Backstreet is the local participating store. For RSD 2025 the Fredericton shop opened its doors at 8am, earlier than the other stores in the Taz family, and if you want the scarce titles you should plan to be in line on Queen Street before that. This is a city where lineups are rare enough to be newsworthy, and the RSD queue outside Backstreet is a genuine annual ritual: lawn chairs, coffee, and collectors comparing want lists in the early morning chill.
The rules are the same here as everywhere, and Backstreet spells them out plainly in its newsletter: most RSD titles are exclusive to the day, pressed in limited quantities, and cannot be held, reserved, or pre-paid in any manner. What you can do, and what the store actively encourages, is send a wish list ahead of time by direct message or email ([email protected]). Staff use those lists to shape their orders, and as they put it, your message “might be the difference between a title being ordered or not.” That’s about as much influence as any RSD shopper gets anywhere on earth.
RSD tip: Check the Record Store Day Canada list rather than the American one before you line up. Some titles that show up on U.S. or European lists never get Canadian distribution, and building your want list from the wrong country’s list is the classic rookie heartbreak.
Beyond the exclusives, RSD morning is simply the best day of the year to take the temperature of the local scene. You’ll meet the serious collectors, hear about upcoming sales, and get a sense of how deep the community runs beneath the city’s quiet surface. Keep an eye on our events calendar each spring for the date.
Buying, selling, and trading used vinyl
Both of Fredericton’s shops deal in used records, and that’s where the local market gets interesting. Backstreet has always operated on a buy, sell, and trade model, and the Downtown Fredericton business directory still lists all three as core services under the new ownership. Casa-Dia was built on used stock from day one. If you have a collection to unload, those are your two professional options, and the etiquette is the same at both: call or message first, especially for larger lots, rather than hauling twelve milk crates through the door unannounced on a Saturday.
Set your expectations like an adult before you sell. A shop needs to resell your records at a margin, so you will be offered a fraction of sticker value, typically more in store credit than in cash. Condition rules everything: a clean first pressing with an intact sleeve is a different object from the same title with ring wear and a skip in track three. The common Canadian-pressing easy listening, orchestral pop, and church-sale classical that fills most inherited collections has almost no resale value anywhere, Fredericton included. What moves here is what moves everywhere: classic rock in good shape, Canadian pressings of collectible titles, punk and metal, hip hop, and clean jazz.
For private sales, the online market does real work in a city this size. Kijiji’s Fredericton vinyl listings and Facebook Marketplace are active, with everything from single albums to estate-scale collections, and the regional buy-and-sell groups connect Fredericton collectors with Saint John, Moncton, and the Miramichi. The usual rules apply: meet somewhere public, check the actual disc rather than the sleeve, and be suspicious of any “rare” label on a record that had a million-copy pressing run. Prices in local private sales tend to run softer than shop prices, which is the polite way of saying there are still deals here that would be picked clean in a bigger market.
Thrift bins, flea finds, and other places records surface
Beyond the two dedicated shops, Fredericton’s records surface in the usual secondhand ecosystem, and the hunting is honest if unglamorous. The biggest single bin belongs to Value Village at 371 Bishop Drive, off Prospect Street on the retail strip. Like every Value Village, the media section is a lottery: mostly water-damaged easy listening and Christmas albums, priced higher than thrift vinyl used to be, but restocked constantly. The people who score here are the ones who check weekly, not the ones who make one pilgrimage. Donation-driven stock means the good stuff appears at random and disappears within hours of hitting the floor.
The city’s other thrift and charity shops, the church rummage sales, and the springtime yard sale circuit all produce records in dribs and drabs. Fredericton’s demographics actually work in your favour: this is a government and university town with a lot of long-settled households, which means estate downsizing regularly pushes decent mid-century collections into the secondhand stream. The yard sale listings that go up around the city each spring and summer are worth scanning for the words “records” or “LPs,” and multi-family sales in the older neighbourhoods around the universities and downtown are the highest-percentage stops.
Two honest caveats. First, Fredericton does not currently have a verified recurring record fair or vinyl show of its own; collectors here travel to shows in Moncton, Saint John, or Halifax when the itch strikes, and occasional pop-up vendors appear at local markets rather than on a fixed schedule. Second, don’t expect the bookstores and antique vendors downtown to reliably stock vinyl; some have carried the odd box over the years, but none maintains a proper record section you can count on. When someone tells you about a magical third record store in Fredericton, they are almost always remembering one that closed. Our shopping guide covers the thrift landscape in more detail.
Turntables and gear: the local reality
Here’s the part of the guide where honesty hurts a little: Fredericton is thin on places to buy turntables and hi-fi gear in person, and it got thinner recently. Tony’s Music Box, the family-run instrument shop founded by Tony George in 1975 at the corner of York and Queen, announced in late October 2025 that it would close, and shut its doors for good at the end of November 2025 after 50 years. Tony’s was primarily an instrument store rather than a stereo shop, but its departure removed one more music retailer from the downtown core and left the corner across from Backstreet noticeably quieter. Its closure was covered by CBC, Global, and CTV, and the outpouring said everything about what downtown music retail means here.
So where does that leave you? Long & McQuade at 981 Prospect Street is now the city’s main musical instrument and pro audio store. Its lane is guitars, amps, keyboards, and recording gear rather than home hi-fi, so treat it as a maybe for DJ-style turntables, cartridges, and cables rather than a destination for audiophile listening setups. Casa-Dia on Riverside Drive is the pleasant surprise in this category: the shop has dealt in turntable parts and vintage stereo accessories since it opened, and it’s the closest thing Fredericton has to a walk-in resource for keeping an old table spinning. For belts, styli, and advice on a thrifted receiver, start there.
For new turntables, most Fredericton collectors end up ordering online or making the two-hour run to Moncton or the four-hour run to Halifax, where bigger audio retailers operate. The other local channel is used: Kijiji and Marketplace regularly turn up vintage receivers, speakers, and tables from downsizing households, often at prices that would make a Toronto buyer weep. Test before you buy, ask when the belt was last changed, and remember that a 40-year-old Japanese receiver that works is usually a better deal than a new plastic all-in-one from a big box store.
The collector community, and the shops that came before
Fredericton’s vinyl community is bigger than its retail footprint suggests, and it has receipts going back decades. When CBC New Brunswick covered the vinyl revival in 2015, the province’s shops were already reporting younger buyers crowding the bins alongside the greying diehards, and that generational mix defines the scene today. Two universities help: UNB and STU keep a rotating population of students discovering records for the first time, and CHSR 97.9 FM, the campus and community radio station up the hill, has long been a gathering point for the kind of people who care about deep cuts and physical media. The collectors you meet in line on Record Store Day range from teenagers to retirees, which is the healthiest possible sign.
The scene also has its ghosts, and it’s worth naming them so you don’t chase stale listings. Secondspin Records opened on York Street in August 2014, announced with a stock of some 3,000 LPs, hundreds of posters, and Rega and Denon turntables, and for a few years Fredericton genuinely had two downtown record stores. Secondspin hosted its own Record Store Day events, including a 2016 appearance by comedian James Mullinger. Its storefront era has since ended, though zombie directory listings for it persist all over the internet. The Maritime Vinyl blog, which chronicled the region’s shops and covered Secondspin’s arrival, remains a lovely archive of the Maritime scene’s recent history.
What does the community look like week to week? Quiet, mostly. There’s no standing vinyl night or collectors’ club with minutes and a gavel. The scene lives in Backstreet’s newsletter and social feeds, in the regional Facebook trading groups, in Casa-Dia counter conversations, and in the annual RSD lineup. That’s proportionate to the city, and there’s something to be said for a scene with no velvet rope: show up twice and you’re a regular, mention what you collect and people start setting things aside. For everything else worth doing in town, start at our things to do hub.
Key takeaways
- Backstreet Records at 384 Queen Street is Fredericton’s anchor record store, selling new and used vinyl and operating on a buy, sell, and trade model.
- Founder Gordie Tufts sold Backstreet to Bob Russell of Halifax’s Taz Records in October 2024 after 44 years, and the staff and name stayed.
- Casa-Dia Vinyl Records at 654 Riverside Drive on the north side specializes in used vinyl plus turntable parts, but call or check socials before visiting.
- Record Store Day each April is the scene’s biggest event; Backstreet opened at 8am for RSD 2025 and accepts wish lists ahead of time by email or DM.
- Tony’s Music Box closed at the end of November 2025 after 50 years, leaving Long & McQuade on Prospect Street as the city’s main instrument store.
- For thrift finds, check Value Village at 371 Bishop Drive weekly, and scan Kijiji and Facebook Marketplace for private collections and vintage gear.
Common questions
Is Backstreet Records in Fredericton still open?
Yes. As of mid-2026, Backstreet Records operates at 384 Queen Street in downtown Fredericton, with hours roughly 10am to 5pm most days, later Thursday and Friday, and noon to 4pm Sundays. It was sold to Halifax’s Taz Records in October 2024, but the name, staff, and buy-sell-trade model carried over. Call (506) 458-8832 to confirm hours before a special trip, since the new owners have discussed eventually relocating within the city.
How many record stores does Fredericton have?
Two dedicated shops: Backstreet Records downtown at 384 Queen Street and Casa-Dia Vinyl Records on the north side at 654 Riverside Drive. Beyond those, records surface at Value Village on Bishop Drive, other thrift shops, yard sales, and online through Kijiji and Facebook Marketplace. Old listings for other shops, such as Secondspin on York Street, are out of date.
Where can I sell my old vinyl records in Fredericton?
Backstreet Records buys, sells, and trades used vinyl, and Casa-Dia Vinyl Records built its business on used stock. Contact either shop before bringing in a large collection. Expect a fraction of retail value, often more in store credit than cash, and know that condition matters enormously. Common easy listening and worn records have little resale value; clean rock, jazz, punk, hip hop, and collectible Canadian pressings sell best. Private sales through Kijiji or Facebook Marketplace can net more but take longer.
Does Fredericton participate in Record Store Day?
Yes. Backstreet Records is the local participating store, and it’s the biggest day of the year for Fredericton vinyl. For the 2025 edition on April 12, the store opened at 8am, with collectors lining up earlier for limited exclusives. RSD titles cannot be held or pre-paid, but the store encourages wish lists in advance by email ([email protected]) or direct message, which genuinely influences what gets ordered.
Where can I buy a turntable in Fredericton?
Options are limited in person. Casa-Dia Vinyl Records carries turntable parts and vintage stereo accessories, making it the best local stop for belts, styli, and repairs on older tables. Long & McQuade at 981 Prospect Street focuses on instruments and pro audio rather than home hi-fi. Most collectors buy new turntables online or in Moncton or Halifax, or hunt vintage gear on Kijiji and Facebook Marketplace, where downsizing households list receivers, speakers, and tables regularly.
What happened to Tony’s Music Box in Fredericton?
Tony’s Music Box, the family instrument store founded by Tony George in 1975 at the corner of York and Queen streets, closed at the end of November 2025 after 50 years. Owner Michael George cited declining viability amid competition from chains and online retail. It was primarily an instrument shop rather than a record store, but its closure was a significant loss for downtown Fredericton’s music retail strip.
Sources & further reading
This guide reflects the documented local consensus, reporting, reviews and community voices, verified where possible. Things change; if we’re out of date, tell Freddy.
- Backstreet Fredericton – Taz Records (hours, phone, location)
- CBC News: Longtime N.B. record store owner sells to Halifax-based Taz Records after 44 memorable years
- Backstreet Fredericton Substack: Record Store Day 2025
- Huddle: Casa-Dia Vinyl Records Gets into the Groove in Fredericton
- Downtown Fredericton business directory: Backstreet Records
- Vinyl World: Record Stores in Fredericton, New Brunswick
- Global News: Beloved family-run Fredericton music store closing after 50 years (Tony’s Music Box)
- Fredericton Independent: Tony’s Music Box reaches its coda
- Maritime Vinyl: Secondspin Records is coming to Fredericton (2014)
- Long & McQuade Fredericton store information