First National Album Day announced

October 2018 welcomes the first ever National Album Day, which will see a weeks worth of festivities to coincide with the 70th birthday of the album format.

Music fans across all genres can get involved, as the new celebration urges album lovers to play their all time favourite album in full at 3:33pm on Saturday 13 October.

The week-long celebrations will see a combination of performances, artist appearances, interviews, and online listening parties.

Paloma Faith has been announced as one of the artist ambassadors for the first year of National Album Day. She explains, "I vividly remember being excited by so many classic albums as I was growing up, like Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, Dylan’s Freewheelin’, and Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun, although, if I had to pick one, the album that most inspired me was Tracy Chapman’s self-titled debut. It featured the incredibly powerful "Why?" - a song that has become a real anthem for me not least as it was the first to bring home the emotional power of lyrics. The way we engage with music may be changing, but for me the album remains the ultimate expression of the songwriter’s craft.”

In 2017 135 million albums were streamed, downloaded, and bought on CD and Vinyl.

Organised by BBC Music, all the BBC radio stations will be joining in with the celebrations, with hopes that National Album Day could grow to be as big as Record Store Day.