'Record Safari': How the owner of Coachella's record store travels across the country to find vinyl for the festival

As the owner and curator of Coachella's on-site record store, Alex Rodriguez has a keen eye for unique and noteworthy vinyl.

In the past four years, leading up to the annual California music festival, Rodriguez has embarked on months-long, cross-country road trips to stock the festival store up to its typical quota of around 30,000 used records.

He travels to well-known stores and obscure stops, seeking out hard-to-find records and other vinyl he sees potential demand for.

For this year's trip, the concept of Rodriguez's search for records caught the eye of an independent film crew, who joined him on the trip and is producing a feature-length documentary about it, titled "Record Safari."

Business Insider met Rodriguez and the film crew at a used record store in New York City, around the halfway point in their trip. We discussed how he goes about picking records, his view on the increased demand for vinyl in recent years, and the most interesting spots that he's found records at in the U.S.

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We met Rodriguez at Academy Records, a new-and-used vinyl shop in Manhattan's East Village. He and the documentary crew following him arrived in a van.

Rodriguez, 37, described how he was "thrown into" his job as Coachella's record store owner. He was working at the Glass House Record Store in Pomona, California, when the opportunity presented itself. The festival previously had a group of vendors selling vinyl, but that fell through in 2013, and Coachella's managers asked him to put a store together in 2 months.

"It was not the best store," he said, "because I had two months to get like 20,000 records. But they liked it enough and said, 'You're the in-house guy now.'"