New vinyl releases! Here are our picks of the week!

Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion

King Khan & BBQ Show - Animal Party

Low Motion Disco - Keep It Slow

The Raconteurs - Old Enough

Tindersticks - Boobar Come Back To Me Lucky Dog

Made In Mexico - Guerillaton

Colossal Yes - Charlemagne’s Big Thaw

George Coleman - Bongo Joe

Emmylou Harris - All I Intended To Be

Neil Young - Live at Massey Hall

We started a Nylvi Christmas Competition a while ago where we said we would give out a freely chosen record to five people who added a link back to Nylvi. The deadline was New Year’s Eve so we just finished the draw, and the lucky winners are: Scott, Melanie, Corey, Sara and SSQ. We will get in touch with you asap concerning the logistics, and will have the records shipped as soon as possible.

Unfortunately we couldn’t give out records to everyone this time. But, we really, really appreciate the contribution from all of you who participated. It’s very much appreciated. Also we are planning on doing more competitions in the future so there should be more chances at getting some free records.

I’d like to use the opportunity to wish everyone a happy new year. Let’s hope 09 will be a good one with lots of new great music!

Christmas is right around the corner and since we have a ton of great sellers on Nylvi with an incredible selection of records we thought now would be the right time to do a small Christmas competition! If you want to participate in the competition what you have to do is to add a link or our badge with a link to Nylvi from your blog, web site or whatever place you keep on the Internet, and either leave a comment to this post with a link back to where you have linked from or send us an email at contact@nylvi.com. Also don’t forget to mention what record you would want us to send you. We’ll keep the competition going till New Year’s Eve and will then announce five winners of a record freely chosen up to $30.

To add this badge, just copy and paste this code into your page:

<a href=”http://www.nylvi.com/”><img src=”http://www.nylvi.com/img/offsite/nylvi_link_120.gif” width=”120″ height=”80″ border=”0″></a>

To get you started here are some of the records we really enjoyed in 2008.

No Age - Nouns

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!

El Guincho - Alegranza

Vivian Girls - Vivian Girls

Gang Gang Dance - Saint Dymphna

Flying Lotus - Los Angeles

Deerhunter - Microcastle

TV On The Radio - Dear Science

Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes

Roots Manuva - Slime & Reason

Crystal Stilts - Alight Of Night

High Places - High Places

The Bug - London Zoo

The Black Keys - Attack & Release

Jay Reatard - Matador Singles 08

Paul Weller - 22 Dreams

Portishead - Third

Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago

Elbow - The Seldom Seen Kid

Zombie Zombie - A Land For Renegades

We try to update the blog here as often as we can with vinyl and music industry news, interesting records from the Nylvi sellers, and whenever there is something else we think should be shared. However, what we have not mentioned yet is that we  also keep a blog on the tumblr platform. We are huge fans of tumblr and the awesome community there, and we are happy to be plugged into it. The same stuff we post here is also available from our tumblr blog together with other interesting things we come across and reblog. So if you want to stay up to date on what is going on, and have it brought to you mixed up with other interesting music related stuff, make sure you head over and check it out.

Also if you’re a fan of Twitter, the short-form messaging service, you can follow us there as well. Throughout the day we post small updates from the Nylvi HQ together with links to new blog posts and interesting offers.

It’s Monday and a new week has started. The sellers on Nylvi have updated their stocks and a lot of new releases are available, here are a few picks:

Death Vessel - Nothing Is Precious Enough For Us

The Killers - Day & Age

Department Of Eagles - In Ear Park

Kieran Hebden & Steve Reid - NYC

Diplo - Blow Your Head

Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan - Sunday At Devil Dirt

Matthew Dear - Body Language Vol. 7

Castanets - City Of Refuge

The Lost Brothers - Trails of The Lonely (Parts I & III)

Asobi Seksu - Me & Mary

Nylvi aims at making local musical innovation globally available on vinyl by working with independent artists, DJ’s, record stores and record collectors. The key way for us to make this happen is the scene pages, where we have teamed up with some of the finest bloggers from these scenes, who share the latest of local news and opinion on music in most forms and styles.

Below are the bloggers we are working with at the moment. They are all added to our blogroll down to the right so if you’re looking for some great music news make sure to check them out.

* 7 inches
* 88 days in my veins
* ALAINFINKIELKRAUTROCK
* Boing Poum Tchak!
* Free Your Mind
* In The Crowd
* Jacuzzi Killers
* Japan Live
* keenplan
* Missingtoof
* Music like dirt
* Parisnormale: Indie Paris News
* Pop Tarts Suck Toasted
* Showtrotta
* The Fast life
* thehookandsling

Also congrats to to 88 days in my veins, who have been nominated by Record of the Day for Best British Blog in 2008!

It’s now a couple of weeks since Nylvi went live and a lot of new and exciting stuff have happened.

First of all we would like to say thank you to all the people, who have signed up. We hope you all will enjoy using Nylvi as much as we enjoy building it!

A very special thank you goes out to all our registered sellers! Thanks to you guys, a seven digit number of records are now available through Nylvi, covering pretty much every genre and epoch in music ever. This gives us a lot of inspiration to continue developing and improving nylvi.com.

Over the last week, most of you have probably noticed a few new features and improvements. Most importantly, we have improved the search functionality by adding more search categories. You can now choose to search inside the categories Artist, Title and Label and the default search is delivering even more intelligent search results.

We have also added a new map on the main scene page, where all sellers are listed based on location. This way everyone can browse and discover sellers based on both country and city location. From the map it’s also possible to see that we already have sellers covering five continents, something we are very happy about!

The great start have made us even more dedicated (if possible) in our work and we’ll continue to work hard on further improvements and new features. We really look forward to take the next steps forward and hope you will join us!

The Nylvi Team

Our second seller tip is about shop appearance, which is a great tool for communicating an identity. There are quite a few options here on NYLVI, so lets go through them one by one.

1. Shop Title
This is easy. You probably already have a name for your shop. Just remember when you first sign up the username you choose is also going to be your shop’s URL. Your unique URL is a great way to drive traffic directly to your shop.

2. Shop Images
On NYLVI it will be possible to browse shops based both on location and name.  This gives the buyers more opportunities to discover different shops and with the right type of images and description it can easily be your shop they visit.

The preview image should be square and ideally 100×100 pixels, while the shop banner must be 560px wide and ideally about 100px high (Height is not fixed so the banner will keep its original proportions). If the images are smaller than the ideal size, they will often look bad, as they will be stretched and blurred. That’s not a good look for your store. To spend some time adjusting your pictures with a photo editor can be a great investment, as clear images and a clear shop identity make it easier for users to relate to your shop.

3. Featured Records
Featured records are another great way of communicating what your shop is all about. You can feature up to 10 records, which will appear below the banner on your shop page. This is makes it easier for buyers to get a quick overview of your stock, and it can make your shop look even better!

4. Customize the header
If the green color in the header clashes with your banner or you just don’t like the color you can easily give the header the color you want from inside Your Nylvi > Appearance

With the full launch just a few days away, we thought it would be a good idea to present some of the new features here on NYLVI.

First out is a feature we have called Collectors’ Items, which will have its own section on NYLVI. The Collectors’ Items section will give buyers access to the sellers’ most rare and valuable collectables and buyers will be able to either browse the full list or search within the section. Records from the Collector’s Items section will also show up on the frontpage. They will be randomly selected among the Collectors’ Items, which includes images, and will be updated several times a day to provide further exposure for more sellers.

So, how do you list a record as a Collectors’ Item?
That’s easy. You just tag Yes [Y] in the Collector’s Items column in your spreadsheet or choose Yes [Y] on the Collector’s Items box when you add a record to your inventory. You can also do this later when you edit a listing. However, remember that you also have to add an image for it to show up on the frontpage.

A second question might be, “which records count as collectors’ Items?”
We leave this judgment up to you. However, the record in question should obviously possess characteristics that justify its status as a collector’s item. You should also take the time to carefully add necessary release info about the record, as this makes it easier for the buyer to verify the record.

We will continue to add Seller tips to the blog in the coming days, so please check back now and then. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to add a comment or contact us by email at help@nylvi.com

First of all thanks a lot to everyone who has signed up so far. We’re really happy to have so many great sellers on board so early and we´re grateful for the response we have received over the last few days. Right now we’re hard at working putting the final touches on the last parts of the service and we’re super excited about getting the whole service up and running, which should be right around the corner. We’ll be back with more information over the next few days, so stay tuned.

However, before we get back to work I thought I should share some pretty cool pictures with you from Yadogg. Who doesn’t love cover sleeves?

And one more thing. We would love to get some more feedback from you. If there is something you would like to tell us just leave a comment to this post or send us an email at contact@nylvi.com.