For one weekend each spring and fall, the Palmer Events Center on Barton Springs Road stops being a convention hall and becomes something closer to a library of everything anyone has ever pressed onto a disc. The Fall 2026 Austin Record Convention runs Saturday and Sunday, October 24 and 25, and general admission is five dollars — a ticket that is good for both days, which is the only sensible way to sell it. The organizers say the show is so big that seeing everything takes most of the weekend, and they are not exaggerating.
The convention bills itself as the largest sale of recorded music in the United States. Spread across 40,000 square feet are more than a million 78s, 45s, LPs, CDs, cassettes, posters and music-related collectibles, offered by hundreds of dealers who travel in from across the country and from Europe. The range is the point: the same hall holds 78s from the 1930s, the odd 8-track, and whatever was pressed last month. Early shoppers get in before the general public — after dealer load-in on Friday, at 8 a.m. Saturday and 9 a.m. Sunday — and parking is available at the Palmer/Long Center garage for twelve dollars.
What makes the convention worth more than a shopping trip is how long it has been going. It began in 1981 at the Zilker Clubhouse, and it began small. Doug Hanners was a local record store manager and vinyl obsessive — he worked at Discount Records on the Drag, the strip of Guadalupe Street beside the University of Texas campus — and his idea was modest: get some fellow collectors together for what amounted to a record swap between friends. Hanners had grown up around records; his father had organized community dances at a YMCA in West Texas, and the soundtrack to those dances was a carefully chosen stack of vinyl.
The swap far outgrew the clubhouse. Shoppers and collectors filled the small space almost immediately, and Hanners was soon looking for a bigger room. He found one in the Palmer Auditorium, the seafoam-and-beige hall that sat like a giant tortoise shell on the banks of Town Lake, now Lady Bird Lake. When that building came down and a new civic events center rose nearby carrying the Palmer name, the convention moved with it — though not without a detour. In 2014 the show lost its home at the Crockett Center on North Lamar and canceled both its spring and fall editions, a decision that angered vendors who depended on the convention for income. "They didn't understand," Hanners told the Austin Chronicle at the time. "They never do, because they don't know what's going on behind the scenes." The convention returned downtown in 2015, and for a stretch it ran once a year rather than twice. It is now back on a twice-yearly schedule.
For decades the show was Hanners' life's work in the most literal sense. The Chronicle described visiting a storage shed in the Hill Country west of Austin where thousands of LPs sat in boxes and crates, the shelves bare after a Swedish collector bought 150,000 45s. That year, 2015, Hanners had rented 275 tables — the most in the convention's history — with dealers flying in from Japan, Ireland, Australia, Sweden and Korea. "It's always a big nervous thing because you never know how it's going to go," he said. "It's different every time and there are no guarantees."
Ownership has since passed to his son, Nathan Hanners, who grew up attending the shows and formed friendships with vendors along the way. He describes the operation less like a trade show than a family reunion — his father, he once told Hilltop Views, is "always around greeting old friends and meeting new friends. It's like a giant family." That inheritance came with a business that has swung wildly with the fortunes of physical media. In the early 2000s, with streaming on the rise, only hardcore collectors turned out. Then vinyl came back. By the spring of 2023, Nathan Hanners told Spectrum News, the convention had put on the biggest show in its forty-year history and had to seat vendors upstairs, something that had never happened before. "Vinyl is so big now, you go to the store and they're repressing everything," Doug Hanners said then, noting that pressing plants had scrapped many of their stampers when CDs took over and that getting an album pressed now can take a year in line.
The revival has changed the crowd as much as the inventory. Alongside the gray-haired collectors hunting original pressings, a younger generation now works the aisles looking for limited-edition Record Store Day releases — the Taylor Swift or Harry Styles pressing that sold out in an afternoon — which has created a category of new rarity that did not exist when the convention started. Nathan Hanners has said he hopes his own daughters will carry the convention on someday.
That is the particular pleasure of a show like this one: it is uncurated in the best sense. There is no algorithm recommending the next record, no grading scale to trust, no listing photo to squint at. Dealers bring what they have, shoppers flip through it in person, and the thing you did not know you were looking for turns up in a crate three aisles over. One out-of-town buyer told CBS Austin that the appeal is exactly that — being able to inspect a record yourself rather than trusting an online seller's description — and described the convention's economics with a collector's candor: "The idea is to spend as much as you can and break even and take home what you want."
The Fall 2026 Austin Record Convention runs October 24 and 25 at the Palmer Events Center, 900 Barton Springs Rd. General admission is five dollars and covers both days; early admission begins at 8 a.m. Saturday and 9 a.m. Sunday. More information is at austinrecords.com.