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Cassettes Are Back, and Booming (fastcompany.com)
Long time reader harrymcc writes: By now, it isn't news that vinyl albums continue to sell, even in the Spotify era. But a new report says that sales of music on cassette are up 140 percent. The antiquated format is being embraced by everyone from indie musicians to Eminem and Justin Bieber. Fast Company's John Paul Titlow took a look at tape's unexpected revival, and why it's not solely about retro hipsterism.
Who has disposable income?
The antiquated format is being embraced by everyone from indie musicians to Eminem and Justin Bieber. Fast Company's John Paul Titlow took a look at tape's unexpected revival, and why it's not solely about retro hipsterism.
There is no reason to use tape aside from "retro hipsterism". (isn't that redundant?) Tape sucks on SO many levels. Anyone who thinks it doesn't isn't old enough to have had to live with tapes. I can see it being kind of novel to someone once or twice but the charm will wear off fast. Seriously, tape has some use cases but playing music shouldn't be one of them. We used it back in the day because there wasn't anything better available.
This is just a handful of hipsters buying a ton of cassette in bulk and not actually a lot of people buying them.
meh, i just dusted off my minidisc player last week!
Vinyl recordings, magnetic tape, photo film. All are on the slow uptick since a few years ago.
Cassetes have died long time ago and were totally pushed out by CD's.
CD's, at the same time, have been conquered by mp3/digital audios.
Now if you are talking about a bunch of retro aficionados, who collect vinyl, collect tapes, collect 35mm cameras. I am glad I do not hear that VHS tapes provide a more reliable image and have a soul.
Realistically, 140% increase is not enough to sustain increased interest in retro technology.
Compact Cassettes are nothing but entirely obsolete. Unlike vinyl which might in some cases have desirable audio characteristics compared with an compresses digital audio file, or even a CD. Cassettes just SUCK period full stop.
They are less seekable than even vinyl (which is quite seekable if you have good turn table) They are all sorts of problems with streching and temperature variation. They don't really have all that great a bandwidth, frequency response. They are fragile. All in all nobody should want to use one of these for anything anymore. It was nice when it was the only technology that could offer portability with good capacity, and good enough reliability (things 8-track did even worse).
What's next 8-track coming back too.
There is nostalgia and there is nonsense, and cassettes belong in the nonsense category.
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While the "up 140%" value is quoted in the article, it did not state absolute figures or the duration of time for the increase. If I sold 10 tapes last year, and 24 tapes this year, that's a 140% increase. But it's still effectively 0 compared to the total volume of music sold.
With thick black glasses and a Muslim-style beard.
Remember, if you sold 1 last and you sold 2 this year, you increased sales by 100%.
I've seen this game far more than I'd care to count on the sales side.
Not a hard feat to do if sales were next to nothing just prior. I still had a cassette player in my 2001 Land Rover, there's definitely still plenty of older vehicles out there that could use them.
Ironically, the resurgence of new retro hipster media (cassettes) that no one owns a player for is only explained by resurgence of yet another form of retro hipster media (vinyl) that has now become rather obscenely priced.
Of course, the only thing even more obscene than paying $30 for a piece of vinyl is paying five times that amount for a concert ticket.
I'm all for supporting artists, but perhaps we could figure out another way of doing it instead of creating another fucking AOL-era of worthless plastic media filling landfills.
Is this what they mean by fake news?
So yearly sales went from 10 per year to 24 per year?
Haha, I kid, I kid.
I busted out some old cassettes here in the last year. Big fun. I remember a friend who was a Communications and media major in college, and he had this radio engineer professor, and he made a tape with an example of AUDIO HUMMMMMMM. When I popped in those old cassettes, AUDIO HUM. It's kind of cool when the film shoots out of the Polaroid camera. It's just another generation's fascination with the artifacts of the past.
I get vinyl. I get CDs. I get MP3s/other lossy options. I get FLAC/other lossless options.
Cassettes offer no advantage over one of the above four options.
What could be more "retro" than 8-track tape. Imagine pulling few of these out at your next hipster party! Yeah they play continuously and have a hearty form factor to hold the curiosity and make a case for art.
If this takes off, with my 8-Track horde I will be rich!
.....started this craze. lol :)
Personally for sound quality I would stick with CD or FLAC format digital file. They are both digital, zero compression and sound great assuming they were mastered properly and you're playing them on good quality speakers. If your speakers are of poor quality or you've lost your high frequency hearing with age, good luck telling the difference.
I can understand the attraction to tape or vinyl formats however. They have a physical aspect which folks also like. It is neat to see a tape load and play or to listen to a record with your amplifier turned off. (The needle actually vibrates loud enough to hear if you listen carefully.) It's like having a steam powered car. It would be fun to play with but not too practical. So just because it's a dated or less than perfect format doesn't mean folks don't have an interest in it.
One wonders if they are making these new cassettes to self destruct like the originals were rumored too
"Tapes were biggest mostly in noise and hardcore, where the fact that they were degraded was almost kind of an asset," says Keyes. "Because it made it sound muddier and screwed with the dynamics and the sound in an interesting way."
Translation the artistic works are so poor and of so little value its better if you don't look or listen to closely.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
We skipped over 8 track. When is that going to be cool again?
all formats, reel to reel, 8-track, cassettes, etc...
tapes can stretch, sooner or later something is going to hang up and you will have stretched tape, with the exception of computer files CD/DVD is the only way to go, just keep them clean & dry and always keep them in their jackets when not in use so they dont get scratched
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
We never teach our kids anything about sound reproduction, basic electronics or radio in high school or college. People are completely ignorant about this stuff so fads like this happen. If they took the time to run through the basic physics behind audio reproduction in schools this stuff wouldn't happen. You don't need to be an electrical engineer to learn the basics of analog audio reproduction. It could be taught in high school. I used to build radios as a kid. When I did become an electrical engineer I built my own amps and preamps but they don't need to go into amplifier topologies to get the basics so people don't do stupid things like buy cassettes. That said, I've never put together my own cassette deck...would make for an interesting project....
Really? The reason for the Cassette Tape revival is that artists can make new albums easily at home? Really? Are there are no such things as CD-R's?
It's "hipster retroism" that's easier to produce on demand than vinyl... that doesn't mean it's not "hipster retroism".
People can spend their money on whatever they choose, but my gawd, just call a duck a "duck" .
New generation gets introduced to these terms. Realizes analog recordings aren't that great and have many drawbacks.
Don't bother posting you think it sounds better. I don't care.
Hipsterism sure, but I don't buy it that tapes are popular for any kind of economic reasons. Seriously you can create your own CD's for no more and maybe less then tapes.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Sure it takes dozens of them to save anything of use anymore, and accessing data from them is painfully slow,
but who are we to argue against the "retro is cool" movement?
I've been buying cassettes from local artists for some time now, simply because I like the form factor of the case better. They are a nice shape and stack nicer than the pile of CDs I also have. Most of the CDs remain unwrapped, just like the tapes remain unplayed. I buy these, obviously to support the artists, but as reminders to go online and play their free streams. That's how I actually listen to the music. The physical product (for me) is about artwork and reminders.
First Vinyl... Then Cassette...
Next CDs will make a comeback. Even retro hipterism can't save the 8-track though.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Unit for unit, on small runs, cassette tape is WAY cheaper than any other medium. You are wrong. Cassettes are not less expensive than pressing out a stack of CD's. If you aren't seeing that, you should find another outfit to press your CD's.
By every possible measure, CD's accomplish everything cassettes do and they do it better. I, literally, cannot think of one feature that makes cassettes better except that maybe they archive longer because they are magnetic vs optical.
.....started this craze. lol :)
And it was still merely nostalgic -- the whole point of Quill's still listening to his Awesome Mix tape was it was the last remaining thing he had from his mother. Still, I'd think that the tape would eventually have gotten ruined from repeated listening. :-)
140% of almost zero is still very close to zero.
I can only hope the next "retro" step is a bunch of hipsters wanting to use the old DAT cassette tapes...we've got several boxes in storage here at work I could shift off on to Ebay.
You're right!
It's about taking advantage of retro hipsterism to rake in cash from stupid retro hipsters.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
No, that would be from 10-14. Your numbers are a 240% increase.
Sorry but you are quite literally 100% wrong.
I can predict what's going to be next: reel-to-reel tape recorders and phonographs.
The summary & article attempt to claim that a 'revival' of cassette isn't just about 'retro hipsterism' but then entirely contradicts itself to wit, the following 2 statements from the article are completely contradictory:
"As tempting as it may be to dismiss cassettes as another display of analog hipsterism, the mini-trend has very real, practical benefits for budding artists like Molholt, who releases music on a tape-only label called Endless Daze."
"Indeed, the appeal of tapes has more to do with collectibility and nostalgia than it does with convenience or sound quality."
The ONLY way these 2 statements could be in any way reconciled is if the author & others 'embracing cassette' think they are 'above' those 'others' who 'collect/buy tapes'...e.g. that somehow some people that are driving the increased sales are 'hipsters' compared to themselves.
Now, to be fair the article does describe some benefits that aren't just about 'coolness'/nostalgia etc. as in 'lower cost', 'easier/faster to produce' etc. for small bands & labels & those reasons do have validity but time & again the article goes back to cassette's being 'cool', 'retro', 'physical/nostaligic connectivity' and the value in the 'physical thing' over and above the actual music included on the 'physical thing'....being 53 years old and someone who proudly maintains and displays a physical collection of DVD's & CD's I'm sitting here going "REALLY? Your only discovering the value of having the PHYSICAL thing NOW?"
The premature demise of vinyl (which I might actually get back in to), cassette & CD was entirely the making of the music industry to begin with. This didn't actually have to happen at ALL. The market for the physical media could be EXTREMELY strong and maintained while at the same time allowing for either free or minimally paid access to 'on-line music'. But the music industry paniced when Napster arrived & ultimately changed to seeing the main value only in the music which is just 'data' and easily copied/transformed from one format to another...hell I can 'sing' or 'listen' to a song entirely in my head without needing any media at all...will it have the same 'fidelity' or 'sound' as good? Of course not, but its easy to imagine a future where humans are a bit 'borg like' where just thinking about a song initiate's full-fidelity play back of the music via stimulation of the physical auditory nerves etc. It doesn't even necessarily need to be a 'borg implant' per se versus say having a headset in your ear & when saying the name of the artist & song say 'Yaz - Only You' will begin play back of the song...at some point if technology can be created to understand 'thoughts' without needing the verbalization than the idea I've expressed here is completed...Now, does that mean nobody would ever want to own the physical media EVER again? HELL NO! Because the connection to the 'art' & the 'artist' is NOT just the music, its the 'experience', its the cool cover art, liner notes...holding the record/tape/CD for the 1000th time while listening to the music...its what makes an 'album' an 'album' vs simply a 'song' or a 'single'. Its the experience, its the building of a 'memory' by an individual in listening to a song, the emotions involved in the entire experience. The song can be the same for every listener but the EXPERIENCE and emotions the song, the artist, album & other qualities that people have will be DIFFERENT for every listener & as humans THAT'S where the true value lies. In fact this is entirely what it means to be 'human', to be an individual vs 'a computer' or 'AI' that can NOT interpret the information differently from one computer/instance of an AI to another.
Ok. that's about enough....
So if its more entertaining to play a cassette for some then who cares what the audio quality is.
We are in an economic crisis. It looks like the housing lenders had something to do with this.
Obviously driven by sales of "Greatest Hits of Guardians of the Galaxy" Volumes 1 + 2... ;)
Does anyone still even produce proper metal tapes anymore? Recordings on those late version tapes and proper recorders are damn near as good as cd...
Its laughable that the website talks about how tapes are great from a cost perspective compared to vinyl, when CDs are significantly better than both.
Perhaps tdk can be persuaded to put a factory back into production..
My stocks of high quality tapes are starting to get low..
Guardians also sold their soundtrack in a limited run on cassette for novelty. iirc they said at that time they had a difficult time finding some place to have them made so its interesting that random artists are finding somewhere
Cassettes actually got decent right at the end with Dolby S noise reduction, but by then it was too late, digital formats had already killed it.
Of course, no prerecorded tapes were made with S encoding, so it didn't help most users.
Turn off DNR. They will stop booming and start hissing.
Seriously though, it's nice to see this analog format sticking around. It does have some advantages, and if I could actually *find* any of my old tapes I'm sure most of them would play--no codecs, no security issues. My boombox has some wonky knobs and a busted antenna, but the Russians have no idea what I'm playing on it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Those of us old enough to remember the 1970s look at cassettes as garbage to be disposed of.
Amen to that!
Unlike CDs or MP3 where I can play a song as many times as I want, I remember wearing out my $8 tapes - that's about what? $25 in todays' money? Trying to learn a song and having to rewind every goddamn time (that took several seconds) and wearing out the tape and the fidelity would go to shit - it became muffled and you couldn't hear some parts anymore and one track would wear out faster.
Which means, if you really liked an album, you had to pony up the $8 AGAIN.
Oh! And god forbid you lend out the tape to a friend.
AND ALSO remember that they are MAGNETIC! Many EM fields would totally screw it up - you'd get these dead spots on the tapes.
Please, they can have the tapes and the machines.
It's easy to spot the folk on here who didn't have access to decent high quality decks..
If you had been willing to spend lots of money then,some decks are still at their list price,35 years later,(pioneer ctf 1000/1250),some have gone up in value( nakamichi 1000/dragon)
sounds a lot better than saying we sold 42 items
As somebody who grew up when cassette tapes had their heyday, I would never go back to that. Slow, prone to become entangled, to deteriorate, awful sound, a pain in the neck to copy, etc. A $10 USB stick will hold more music than my entire collection of cassette tapes in the 80s did; the sound quality of the tracks will in general be far better; the format is more portable and convenient; it can be trivially backed up. May cassette tapes stay in the history books, where they belong - they were great, at the time, but today they are ridiculous.
I recorded some live performances to cassettes with Dolby S before I had the ability to record to hard drive. I was amazed at the difference, and in side-by-side comparisons I liked it better than minidisc. I also used DAT, which was superior to everything.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Cr02 or Metal tapes recorded with Dolby B or C on a hi-fi grade deck will sound MUCH better than a ferrous cassette in a boom box. Such a recording is good enough that it will not immediately stand out as a hissy scratch fest that exemplifies an Edison wax cylinder. However, I suspect these band releases are being done on low grade ferrous tape and mostly being played back on boom box grade equipment.
From the mid seventies through the late eighties the technology being the format was very much improved over the format's introduction in the early sixties. It is very easy to forget that analog tech at the beginning of the digital era was extremely refined and incorporated most of a century's worth of incremental improvements.
None of this is meant to suggest that cassettes are superior to high bitrate/high bit depth digital formats. Nonetheless a good recording on a metal/Cr02 in a well maintained deck can sound very very good.
Techmoan on cassette audio of that caliber:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVoSQP2yUYA
why it's not solely about retro hipsterism
LOL! That's all it EVER is with audio. Same with vinyl.
You don't see movie lovers going back to VHS/BETA/Laserdisc/8mm/etc. unless there's a specific release limited to those formats (Star Wars on LD, for example). And then it's a Herculean effort to transfer it faithfully to a modern format.
... is expensive (by the low supply: economics 101), what makes all "low price" argument totally nonsense
There were 11,489 cassettes purchased during the Holiday Season (an increase of 140% over 2015).
Taken from the PDF, linked to the report referenced in TFA.
I still have a couple high-end cassette recorders that haven't seen use for at least 20 years. That was the thing back in what the 80's? I used to buy blank metal tape and record all my albums onto cassette to listen to in the car. That was bitchin' quality back then ... until CDs came out which pretty much killed cassettes for cars.
Maybe I will have the chance to sell these recorders for something...
Karma: Bad
In a related stories, wooden pencil sales are up 140%.
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O M F G. I clicked through to the report (warning: PDF) (more dire warnings: crappy infographic style; pages are portrait orientation) and it's even more hysterical than I thought. "Booming", you say?
There were 11,489 cassettes purchased during the Holiday Season (an increase of 140% over 2015).
Compare that to
AUDIO STREAMS reached a new record high of 250.7 BILLION, up 82.6% over 2015.
To an ant, a firecracker looks like an atomic bomb. There were TWENTY-TWO MILLION times more streams than cassettes sold. Even if you call 1 stream = 1 song and figure a cassette has 10 songs, that's still TWO MILLION to ONE.
Two words: statistically insignificant.
From Wikipedia: "Sales of pre-recorded music cassettes in the U.S. dropped from 442 million in 1990 to 274,000 by 2007." So 2016 saw ONE TWENTY-FOURTH of what was sold in disamal 2007, which was 1/1613 the size of the market in 1990. "Booming", indeed.
Fucking A. The numbers are fine but the "story" is BULLSHIT. What a complete waste of (virtual) ink.
In a related story, my sex life is booming -- there was a 100% increase from 2015 to 2016. (Got some twice last year, versus once the year before.)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Is feeling the pain of having to save and load data for my TI99/4A and tandy PC4 pocket computer on cassette. I imagine it will be a lot like toggling in bootstrap code to an Altair 8800: do it a couple times and you're gonna throw a rom in there....
i am so very tired....
I get the nostalgia and novelty value of using old media. I even understand liking LPs because at least they had decent-sized art and liner notes. But cassettes? --ing cassettes?
I've written about this before, but basically, cassettes combine the worst aspects of LPs and CDs.
Makes sense to me. People are voting for the shittiest person to be our president in history, and buying the most shitty recording medium ever invented.
I thought releasing stuff on cassette was a death/black metal thing.
I was around when CDs came around when I was a wee lad. I couldn't listen to any of the LPs in my vast collection again without cringing, even though it took me years to be able to afford one. Still, after being able to afford a CD player, I couldn't afford to replace LP titles with CDs. And when I could afford that, many titles were never released again as CDs.
Now, everyone knew that listening to a cassette was a resource of last resort, like when in the car. For LPs were much less noisy and more convenient to search tracks.
Not so with CDs, whose quality was orders of magnitude better than LPs, smaller enough to be found in cars and easy to change tracks.
So just why the heck are morons nostalgic LPs? And now even cassettes? I may not have a bridge to sell you, but I do have a few LPs to sell you. Just ping me if you're interested, ejit.
Berry One: 'Member cassettes?
Berry Two: Yeah, I 'member!
Berry One: Yeah, I 'member too. Cassettes sucked donkey balls.
Berry Two: Yeah, sure did!
Since vinyl and now cassettes are coming back, what's next, the 8-track? I still have some Freddy Fender and Boston tapes that might play. clunk clunk
Beware of the Redittor who loans you a Sharpie.
Yes, I'm exaggerating but you know what I mean. Cassettes aren't coming back. Only the hipster'est hipsters give a crap about them.
As long as we're going full-tilt, let's go all the way....no microprocessors needed!
With all the alien technology in that movie, you would think that he would have found some way to transfer it to memory crystal or whatever. Or, he could just fly to a location about 40 light years from Earth, turn on his radio, and receive the music "live". I bet he could even hear Casey Kasem!
Regret, didn't courage.
captcha: belabors
Cassettes degrade with every play. Much more so than vinyl, which can be played with a good player with minimal wear. Cassettes however... I used to use them a lot as a teen, they wear out pretty fast.
Think it's the same reason why 8-tracks really never saw a revival. That old school magnetic media is really crummy, and worn tapes don't sound better, they sound like crap. Nothing nostalgic about magnetic damage to the tape from repeated playback.
Personally, I'd only interested in original CD's if I was collecting an old format, since that high quality CD sound never degrades.
You'd think that he would have transferred it to some alien recording medium at some point but that wouldn't have been quite a funny. It's amazing that Walkman still runs after decades and that he was able to find a compatible power source when the batteries ran out. One also wonders where he got the tape deck in his space ship, rather implies that he did go back to Earth at some point.
We live in the digital world, It has no sense to be limited to a specific media.
A simple USB 2.0 memory stick under 9$ can store more than a thousand songs compressed to the equivalent of a classic CD player.
Apparently tapes are still big in prison. Prisoners can't be trusted with CDs. They don't have internet access or personal computer access, so no MP3s/iTunes. They can't hide things in clear tapes or turn them into weapons.
If you make just the right mix tape for that special girl, there is a 102% chance of sex later that day.
What is so difficult about this to understand?
Yesterday I sold 1 lemonade. Today I sold 3, that's a 200% increase in sales!
If we follow the slope of the line we'll be selling trillions of lemonades by the end of the month. (205,891,132,094,649 if I've calculated that right)
And this has already been covered elsewhere.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
For about $2 apiece, tapes can be produced in small quantities much more quickly than vinyl records, whose own resurgence has slammed pressing plants with so much demand that a new record can take up to six months to turn around. And unlike with vinyl, musicians can produce new copies of cassettes in their apartment in a pinch.
Imagine the excitement when, in a decade or so, hipsters re-discover the antiquated 'CD' format...
The key word is "up". Therefore the change does not include the original. A 40% increase from an original value of 10 is 4, or 14 total. A 140% increase from an original value of 10 is 14, or 24 total.
Using the same numbers, if an electric pump is rated to move 10 gallons per minute, but is overdriven by increased voltage to pump 14 gallons per minute, it can be said that the pump is running at 140% of capacity. The 140% includes the original.
The problem is all in the semantics of language.
I have a novel idea. Car stereos should all accept lossless formats! Then musicians can give out lossless audio on USB drives that people can plug into their cars immediately on the way home from a concert.
until people (re)discover that cassettes really are shit for many reasons, and nothing is going to improve that now.
...at least for cars.
I dont like creating playlists for MP3s.
I like CDs, but they scratch too easily in my car. But minidiscs, I can throw around and they never get damaged. And theyre rewritable.
140% of almost nothing is still almost nothing.
Open reel, cassette, vinyl, ... they all suffer from needing mechenical contact. The oxide on the tape flakes off, and they accumulate on the rollers and tape heads so you have to periodically clean them if you want to stay half way close to spec (which is nothing to write home about. Cassettes win strictly on ease of use and the ubiquity of cassette players in cars back in the day.). Guess what, each spec of oxide that flakes off is some random bit of the signal that is lost forever, Now with the improvements to A/D and D/A converters and cheap silicon everywhere, it is strictly hipsterism to prefer cassettes or vinyl of that matter over inexpensive but well executed digital music playback solutions. Next they will be driving Trabants and telling people it is better than a Tesla.
I only use wax cylinders for my music listening needs.
I guess all those people who were 12 when cassettes were in are having their midlife crisis now?
Cassette tape in a good deck, using high-bias tape (Chrome or Metal) equals or beats FM radio, as well as most MP3s at less than 192K. Of course, it takes up more space...and it's more fragile than a little stick...and...and...
The real pitch: if you have a old car with a cassette player in it (preferably with Dolby), the tape often is better than CD. CDs, at least in my cars, skip frequently due to bumps and general cruddy power supply. Tape just works. And the compression and lack of highs really don't matter much in that high-background-noise application. Niche, to be sure, and a MP3 player is just as good (but no aux input in the olde car...).
And those sales numbers: isn't that like claiming a fantastic % increase when you're coming off practically zero?
Hipsterism ... yes, absolutely ... except for a few of us Luddites who still have the old stuff in our old cars ...
Speaking of component cassette decks, the last one I bought only lasted a few years before one of the internal belts failed and made it useless. Is there anyone still making a decent component so I can get one back in my system and listen to all these Chicago albums?
This was my first thought.
Also: https://xkcd.com/1102/
You can't stick a pencil in a USB stick and twirl it around.
Well, not if you want to plug the USB stick back into anything ever again.
I brushed it off thinking that Quill must have gotten some alien tech that made it work like new, forever. That's what Doctor Who would have done.
This too shall pass. The days are numbered for any old-timers that are embracing such an inefficient and clumsy medium for nostalgic purposes -- and for hipsters embracing old technology to be retro.
one of the reasons tfa lists as contributing to the cassette revival is that it is cheap for artists to make copies. because cd's are so expensive? i can't imagine cd's would be more expensive then an empty tape. and a music cd bruns in what? a few minutes, each cassette copy takes a lot more time, even with hight speed copy and all that nonsense.
Also, what is the point? Who is there left in this world which still has a cassette player you can distribute your 'cheap' copy to?
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I'm an indy musician. I don't have a lot of cash, and I don't have a lot of sales. Unit for unit, on small runs, cassette tape is WAY cheaper than any other medium.
The fact that it is cheaper for YOU doesn't mean it follows that it is the best choice for your customers unless you have very specific sorts of customers. You have to show that there actually is demand for it in the cheaper format. Cassette tape players are no longer as readily available as they once were so someone who uses them either has one left over from the old days or they've made a conscious decision to seek out the technology. In either case they probably have enough disposable income to afford something more modern if they want it. If they aren't willing to pay more then it probably says more about the market value of your product than it does their ability to pay for it.
But yes, from a marketing and artistic standpoint, having a physical product on offer for those who want it is important, and no, streaming and digital downloads alone don't satisfy that need.
Personally if the only physical product you offered me was a cassette tape I'd be looking around to find out where I wandered through the time machine. I don't even own a cassette player anymore (got rid of my last one probably 15 years ago) so you'd be offering my a physical product I cannot use. Offering cassette tapes either means you have a VERY niche (and probably old) audience or you are marketing to hipster douchebags who get a kick out of old-timey technology that sucks in reality.
Yes, I was around for cassettes the first time. I was around before CDs. I know all the arguments, and have lived through them. Your casual dismissal is just incorrect.
If my dismissal was incorrect then we would still be buying cassette tapes and you'd still see music from the major labels offered on them non-ironically and they'd still be getting installed as OEM equipment in cars. The simple fact is that we are not. Analog cassette tapes fell out of favor for extremely good reasons. If you've found a small pocket of people who still want to bother using them then good for you but let's not pretend it's a format we should be seeking to go back to or that it has any sort of use case that isn't a very tiny niche.
Even re-releases were affected and I think it's the main reason why vinyls are still here.
Vinyl records are still a thing because of "audiophiles" who like to pretend that they have special hearing powers the rest of us don't and hipster douchebags who like the idea of using what amounts to steampunk technology to seem superior and "edgy". Acoustically vinyl is better than cassette tape but that's pretty much the definition of damning with faint praise.
Considering cars with casette players are still available (yes, 2nd hand, I know), some may choose that compromise.
Nobody buys a car because it has a cassette player and they certainly don't base their music library around the fact that they are buying cars that are probably >10 years old. There hasn't been any cars sold with a cassette player as OEM equipment since 2010 and most dropped the equipment long before that.
As for "sucks on SO many levels", I just hope you don't base that on unmaintained cheap players and casettes
No I base it on several decades of having to live with tapes. I'm old enough to pre-date CDs (heck I pre-date the Sony walkman) and there were very good reasons why the market stampeded to CDs and dumped tapes decades ago.
But if you have the new iPhone, you won't be able to plug in the adapter either.
That would be true if they lose the 3mm-to-lightning adapter that comes standard in the box with every iPhone.
As a long time (I start Medicare this year) low-fi audiophile, I wanted to bring up a couple points on the topic. Cassettes are not always used as a source for music. Many of us are into recordings of the spoken word and cassettes have always had enough fidelity for that. I've been a collector of radio programs (anything from the 1920s to present) for many years and cassettes (and reel-to-reel) have been well-suited to that hobby. That said, yes, I am digitizing my collections for both backup and random-access purposes but I still do use my cassette playing equipment (Nakamichi and Sony) for casual listening. Regarding 8-track tapes, yes, they were really the best solution for the automobile application in their day. But I would like to mention they had a competing format, the 4-track cartridge. The technology was similar to the 8-track except that, unlike the 8-track cartridge with contained the pinch roller, in 4-tracks the pinch roller was in the player and inserted itself into an opening in the bottom of the cartridge when it was placed into the player. Also, the 4-track and only 2 program selections as opposed to the 8-track's 4. I have a working combination 4- and 8-track player by Muntz mounted under dash in my 1959 Volvo. BTW, one can still buy belts for these players and repair parts (foil splicing tape, pressure pads, etc.) for the cartridges.
I was pleased to read that some of the tape enthusiasts saw the lack of fidelity as a feature not a bug. Music can be enjoyed in very low fi. Over an AM radio for example. And Old 78s of Opera and Jazz are prized. I think the appeal of vinyl is in the warmth that comes with just a taste noise. Not noisy noise, just a little. Like Vaseline on a lens. Or an old faded print. Tube amplifiers produce warm sound with power to boot. We like white noise: ocean sounds; an air conditioner humming away on a hot night. The thrum of a diesel as one shoos through the night dozing in one's first class coupe.
You know this made me glad I kept those old cassettes and the 80s vintage stereo to play them on. Think I'll spin up some Blondie.... maybe Prince.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
You appreciate music more with a tape... because you have to get to it. Nowadays with music so easily available, music is worth a lot less, because you can just flick through it or carry thousands of songs around in your pocket. Bill Drumond was onto something when he suggested that the Ipod had ruined music.
Of course all of the people here seems to be millennials that never used tapes for real, or lousy nerds that never taped music and/or are hi-fi douches.
Cassette Tapes came in 15, 30, 60, 90, 120, 150 and 180... even 240 minutes. Beat that with a 90 Min CD. They have HiFi sound if you are not so cheap and buy the stereo ones only.
I convert tapes to CDs and when someone gives me a 120 min tape, I need to spend a rough time telling them why their ONE cassette needs to be broken in 2 CDs. Often they ask me to just copy the cassette to a new one for save the trouble to use 2 CDs for their records.
I accept that cassettes wear with time and broke, but for casual listening with a low budged or a working place where phones are banned is a good solution.
Chalk up the common nerd drama of "I don't use it, NOBODY IN THE UNIVERSE MUST USE IT. NOT BAZINGA!"
Cassettes hiss. They don't boom. Vinyl pops, scratches and rumbles. Makes for good fruit bowls too, just add hot water.
Have you listened to today's music? Anything to minimize and degrade the experience would be a plus. ;]
and it's in the studio, before mix-down. It is not a consumer format, no matter how much you want it to be.
Time to start playing indie and Top-40 hits on AM radio stations? Really retro man!
Cassettes fucking suck.
Cassette's are for posers.
True music fans know wax cylinders are the only way to go.
How come they can't be fixed with tape and rewound with a pencil?
I tried, and for the life of me I can't find any cassettes. Also, where can you get a tape head, pinch rollers, and rubber belts, when your old one wears out?? Thanks for any info!