For a Missouri Cassette Tape Factory, Obsolesence is Just a 12-Letter Word (arstechnica.com)

The Missouri-based National Audio Company, reports Ars Technica, is sweeping up in a category that our future-looking selves might twenty years ago have imagined would be dead and buried in the year 2015: making and selling audiocassettes. There are fewer and fewer competitors in the tape-making business, but NAC still has a healthy market for cassettes -- in October, the company noted "a 31 percent increase in order volume over the previous year." From the article: [Company president Steve Stepp] said that as his competitors began bailing out of the cassette business once CDs came to prominence, NAC started buying up their machinery. “It would have been incredibly expensive 30 to 35 years ago when [cassette manufacturing machines] were new on the market, but when our competitors bailed out of the business and started making CDs, we went round the country and bought [them] out," he said. Some artists are still releasing music on tape, but about 70 percent of what the company sells is blank cassettes; there are an awful lot of tape decks out there; my father alone still buys a few hundred blanks each year.

Comments

Very few mediums die completely

[Viol8]

Obviously there are exceptions like wax cylinders and stone tablets, but in general if a medium is cheap and/or does a job thats not easily or cheaply replicated elsewhere it'll stick around. As soon as the Next Thing comes along certain people always predict the demise of that which its superceding. Cassette was supposed to kill vinyl. It didn't. Ditto CDs, they didn't. MP3s were supposed to kill CDs and cassettes. They didn't. Streaming - we are told - is the end of downloads. Yeah, right. DVD killed VHS? No it didn't - not until set top box recorders came along to fill in that functionality. Automatic gearboxes were the death knell of manual transmissions. Oh really? Now driverless cars will be the end of human driven cars. No, don't think so.

Anyone who predicts the end of anything without waiting a few decades is an idiot.

Re:Very few mediums die completely

[MightyYar]

CDs killed vinyl just as surely as digital has killed CDs. That a few holdouts still use them does not make them any less dead as a mainstream medium. You can still ride a horse if you like, and once a year a significant number of people even watch a horse race. That does not mean that the automobile did not kill the horse.

"still buys a few hundred blanks each year."

[Nutria]

That's more than the number of weekdays in the year. What the hell does he do with that many?