When Taylor Swift’s releases her new album, “Life of a Showgirl,” in October, it can be heard on the usual places, including streaming, vinyl and…cassette tape?
The cassette tape was once one of the most common ways to listen to music, overtaking vinyl in the 1980s before being surpassed by CDs. But the physical audio format has become an artifact of a bygone era, giving way to the convenience of streaming.
Or, that’s what many thought.
In 2023, 436,400 cassettes were sold in the United States, according to the most recent data available from Luminate, an entertainment data firm. Although that’s a far cry from the 440 million cassettes sold in the 1980s, it’s a sharp increase from the 80,720 cassettes sold in 2015 and a notable revival for a format that had been all but written off.
Cassettes might not be experiencing the resurgence of vinyls or even CDs, but they are making a bit of a comeback, spurred by fans wanting an intimate experience with music and nostalgia, said Charlie Kaplan, owner of online store Tapehead City.
“People just like having something you can hold and keep, especially now when everything’s just a rented file on your phone,” Kaplan told CNN.
“Tapes provide a different type of listening experience — not perfect, but that’s part of it. Flip it over, look at the art and listen all the way through. You connect with the music with more of your senses,” he said.
This sound like some type of manipulation.
My son is into them. My daughter is into CDs. Both are retro cool, because they are.
i always get them!
The problem is, every modern cassette deck on the market except for one by TEAC and TASCAM is fucking crap. You’re pretty much stuck using vintage gear which hasn’t held up too well. I had a Pioneer deck that sounded fantastic but broke. Like unfixable because they don’t make the parts anymore. I have a TEAC deck from the '90s that sounds like crap now. I’m just done with it. You have plenty of good choices when buying a new turntable. Where as with cassettes you have two descent ones, and the rest are AIDS.
Edit: Also, the two descent ones are expensive.
Don’t listen to “audiophiles” otherwise literally no audio equipment is ever good, and it becomes a who can spend the most money contest.
A cassette player from FiiO will sound absolutely great and work fine.
Older dude here:
There is no advantage to listening to something on a cassette, except for the vintage brownie points.
I did the analog to digital transition, and miss nothing. There was an intermediate time, when mp3s came along, and people were lowering bitrates to absurd levels, but digital is simply better.
All the people talking wonders about the “warmth”, “tone”, and other supposedly desirable qualities are very mistaken. What they are fawning over is noise, feedback, muddiness, lack of range, lack of definition, and so on. Vinyl records are shit. They make sound by literally scratching something.
The only advantage of tape was, at the time, it’s smaller size and portability, but sound was worse than records. I still have the last deck I owned, a marvel of technology of the time, a double auto-reverse TEAC deck with Dolby and Dbx noise reduction, auto azimuth, programmable, etc, which is objectively shit compared to a decent mp3 player, provided that the music is encoded in lossless, or large enough bitrate.
CDs were a massive improvement, and the pinnacle were DDD CDs, which were Digital recording, Digital mixing, and Digital mastering, meaning very little analog garbage was introduced in the process.
The objective for audio equipment is to be transparent, to not add or detract anything from the original performance.
With CDs they were negatively impacted by the loudness war as it became much more widespread. Having to hunt around for the right recording, often the earlier ones, can be expensive. Normalisation of the recordings by streaming companies is just an awful idea as it doesn’t fix the bad parts of the mix just turns everything down.
I prefer SACDs to CDs, mostly because they tended to be mastered and mixed better than the CDs of the past two decades. The surround audio mixes are mostly just gimmicky, although they are a good fit for some records, but they almost always had a two channel mix that you could pick instead. The higher frequency range is mostly pointless.
Not Taylor Swift but my older kid is really into retro music devices. He has a Walkman, a separate tape recorder, a record player and a boom box, and buys vinyl and cassettes
Gen Z is an interesting bunch. Opting for blurry photos and bringing back JNCO jeans.
The 90’s are back.
Blurry photos is fine to make an stylistic choice. The 2019 movie The Lighthouse stylistically looked like a 1920s film, before modern music intentionally used bitcrushing, it used vinyl cracks, boomer shooters made in this decade intentionally look like 1990s Doom clones.
When a medium’s shortcoming is patched by technology, it ultimately becomes an artifact of the era where it was accidental. Once a few years have passed, it becomes more synonymous with the era than the mistake.
It’s not necessarily nostalgia, Gen Alpha and the younger half of Gen Z never grew up without smartphones, so they don’t miss the era of poor film photography. Although every generation does this simulation of forgotten mistakes, it’s particularly poignant now, where the high quality, perfectly lit, professional feeling photos convey something artificial, i.e. smartphone software emulating camera hardware, faces tuned with filters or outright AI generated content. Even if it’s false imperfection, the alternative is false perfection.
Art using deliberate imperfections that were unavoidable in the past is romanticising something perceived as before commercialism, and that’s admirable.
“Blurry photos”? Those are just photos with a shallow depth of field. That never went out of style.
Became harder to do with phones though.
I burned a few CDs and put one of them in my car’s CD player
It worked but I got hit with “tray error” when I tried ejecting it.
It’s been stuck in there since april
That’s the authentic experience
The next level is getting one of those radio tuners, a discman, and explaining to your friends that you use the discman, because the car CD player is broken.
If the car has a cassette player, you can get this cassette with a 3.5 jack coming out of it, and then connect that to the discman to listen to CDs! The 90’s were fun.
Those worked pretty well by the end, tbh
Part of the car now.
“the pre-owned volvo of tourist@lemmy.word” is not as catchy as “The Ship of Theseus”
I showed them all this stuff before and my kids thought it was lame. Their friends start to listen or wear said things and now it’s cool… Kids lol nothing changes.
I did all the trendy thing when I was a kid. Even made the mistake of wearing FUBU once as a white guy.
don’t worry it’s still not cool.
I’m a Millennial/GenZ cusper and I think its just the desire to go back to a simpler analogue lifestyle. I’ve also bought a few cassettes from concerts at times when I couldn’t carry around a full vinyl the rest of the night
I definitely prefer to purchase my music on CD when possible. As someone who grew up with Cassettes, it’s one tech I’m fine with being pushed into history. I’d rather have Minidiscs than cassettes.
Shit medium that inevitably ends up pulled by a faulty mechanism and destroyed. I remember patching broken tapes with adhesive tape all the time.
yeah. i wonder why they aren’t binging back VHS too. because it objectively sucks compared to what we have now.
VHS isn’t coming back because you simply can’t buy a CRT and VCR. These are no longer being made, the existing ones are degrading and overpriced.
Otherwise they’d absolutely be back, a lot of videos on YouTube and TikTok are specifically longing for VHS.
How about reel-to-reel? Unlike cassettes, it actually sounds good. Probably the best you’ll ever hear from an analog format.
Nagra ftw.
Was reel-to-reel ever mainstream?
I always had the impression that it was too complicated and/or expensive for most.
It was always expensive and niche. Only a few commercial releases even at its peek. Most of the machines were used for mastering, not personal listening.
They’re not that complicated. They just look that way when you’re threading the reel through the mechanisms. There’s a logic to it, and it’s pretty easy once you understand that. Does have a little more maintenance than a record player or cassette deck. Stuff needs to be lubed right.
Edit: also, note that people aren’t necessarily buying cassettes or vinyl to listen to them. Lots of vinyl is purchased by people who don’t even own a turntable. It’s for the art and physicality.
I just bought a cassette for my favorite band, Mad Routine. I don’t intend to use it, because it’s a special item with a limited run, but I would if I had a spare and a cassette player.
Ooooh so that’s why I saw a twenty something trying to buy a cassette player at the thrift store last weekend!
Wow, my cars cassette player may finally seen some use!!!
I’ve seen a lot of bands doing that at their merch table. I think for most bands, it’s just a keepsake like buying a T-shirt or sticker or whatever after a show. I’m sure there’s plenty of people who prefer cassettes (or at least the Walkman aesthetic) but for the most part, it’s just a souvenir.
I’ve never been into tapes but I collect vinyl. Part of the fun is all the extras tossed in. It’s like buying a boxed set or special edition DVD/Blu-Ray. Tapes don’t really have the same space for fun stuff but Taylor Swift probably has the budget to do something “extra” and make it a whole thing people put on Instagram.
I don’t subscribe to any streaming services. I have vinyls and tapes. If I want to listen to music on the go, I use my walkman with music I’ve recorded from vinyl or, in very rare cases, YouTube.
My 9 year-old has a walkman too and it’s the greatest thing ever. She doesn’t have a smartphone, but the walkman enables her to listen to her own mixtape when we’re traveling. She loves it.
Actually, I’ve seen quite a few people with feature phones around lately, a walkman would be perfect for them for the same reason.
Also, making mixtapes is still as great as it was back then. A playlist is not the same, not by a long shot. I made one for my little sister recently and it was all kinds of fun to make sure both sides were filled, that the mood and energy was cohesive, that it was tracks I genuinely believed she would enjoy but also tracks that I knew she wouldn’t seek out on her own. (Fuck algorithms for recommending music — they won’t challenge you or surprise you.)
Edit: Also, releasing on cassette isn’t even that new this time around. For instance, all of Mac Miller’s stuff has been available on cassette for at least a few years. Like, check out HHV’s listing of cassettes: https://www.hhv.de/en/records/catalog/filter/tape-D2M74N4U9 and https://imusic.dk/exposure/8138/kassettebaand has a surprising number of metal albums on cassette.
How is it any different than making a playlist? You said a long shot, that’s not true.
I am not talking about Spotify, I never use it, but unless you are talking about the level of effort to make the tape, then what’s the difference?
Records are bulky, heavy, and horribly environmentally bad. Cassettes aren’t as bad but are really inconvenient.
I got rid of all of those years ago and I am so glad I did.
I still have a music collection, I don’t use streaming services though. And no no CDs either.
I feel like tape fans were always there, just like vinyl fans. There are some special subcategories of them like Sony Walkman fans for example. Or those who like tape saturation/distortion. In music production it’s even used as an effect sometimes: people pass their whole audio output through tape record and immediate playback just to introduce some of that saturation. Also I’ve always seen niche cassette limited edition releases here and there.
This reminds me of Kung Fury, which has a very 80’s/90’s aesthetic. They tried a variety of ways to filter the final movie to give it the right feel for the time period. Finally, unsatisfied with digital methods, they ended up running it through an actual VCR.
