Record stores in Cairo

Record shops reward the patient digger. Cairo, Cairo has 5 mapped right now. That's 5 record shops mapped around Cairo. Every shop grades and prices differently, so the same record can be a bargain in one and a splurge in another — dig everywhere. Check the grading before you pay — a visual grade and a play grade are two different things.

This guide covers every record store we could verify in and around Cairo (within about 40 km), built from OpenStreetMap's community-maintained data. Names you'll run into include Distingo and Flex Music, plus sherrys.vinyl. If a record shop's missing from Cairo's list, it probably just hasn't been mapped yet.

The Cairo record lineup

5 mapped within about 40 km:

What the map tells us about record stores in Cairo

3 of the 5 list their opening hours on the map, which is genuinely useful — record shops keep shop hours, so the listed times are usually reliable.

Most of the record stores in Cairo list a phone number. Useful for asking what's just come into the used bins.

The Cairo record crawl

Making a day of it in Cairo? Work this order: Distingo on 70 شارع 9, Flex Music, sherrys.vinyl, Retrograde Records on 8 شارع المنصور محمد, and Sherry's Vinyl on شارع ابن النبيه. That's the record crawl in one sensible loop, no backtracking.

Record digging tips for Cairo

How the regulars work Cairo's bins:

• The listening station is the test at Distingo. If a record looks questionable, play the loud passages. That's where surface noise shows up.
• Ask about want-list services at Flex Music. Good shops will keep an eye out for your grails. It takes patience, but the call when it lands is worth it.
• Learn your labels. Certain labels mean certain quality. A quick education in the labels of your favourite genres pays off fast.
• Buy the weird stuff. Private pressings, local bands, oddball compilations — the strange records are the ones that appreciate.

Good to know

We searched about 40 km around Cairo — that covers the town itself plus the surrounding communities you'd reasonably drive to. Listings come from OpenStreetMap, mapped by local volunteers, so a brand-new record store in Cairo can take a while to appear. The 5 above are only as current as the community map. A record store that's shut, or a new one nobody's added yet, gets fixed with a single OpenStreetMap edit.

We don't list prices or stock — both change by the day. What we list is the where: real shops, verified by real mappers.

If you run one of the 5 listed here and something's wrong — a closure, a move, new hours — the fix is the same: update the shop on OpenStreetMap and the correction flows through to this page on the next daily refresh.