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A Global Shortage of Magnetic Tape Leaves Cassette Fans Reeling (wsj.com)
A reader shares a report: Steve Stepp and his team of septuagenarian engineers are using a bag of rust, a kitchen mixer larger than a man and a 62-foot-long contraption that used to make magnetic strips for credit cards to avert a disaster that no one saw coming in the digital-music era. The world is running out of cassette tape (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source). National Audio Co., where Mr. Stepp is president and co-owner, has been hoarding a stockpile of music-quality, an-eighth of an inch-wide magnetic tape from suppliers that shut down in the past 15 years after music lovers ditched cassettes. National Audio held on. Now, many musicians are clamoring for cassettes as a way to physically distribute their music. The company says it has less than a year's supply of tape left. So it is building the first manufacturing line for high-grade ferric oxide cassette tape in the U.S. in decades. If all goes well, the machine will churn out nearly 4 miles of tape a minute by January. And not just any tape. "The best tape ever made," boasts Mr. Stepp, 69 years old. "People will hear a whole new product."
The real reason is hipsters. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way, but once the CD took over and things like vinyl records and cassette tapes left stores, hipsters who wanted to be different kept buying vinyl whenever and however they could. There's arguments to be made about sound quality and at the very least an album can sound different on vinyl under the right (read: expensive) circumstances but for the most part the novelty was in the fact that they had their music in some non-mainstream format.
And then Record Store Day came along and was actually successful in the long run. Sure, the Independent Record Store is still an endangered species but the long term effect was that people started wanting to buy records again in mainstream numbers. Now you can buy vinyl records everywhere from Best Buy to Target. We had a story just like this one a while back about how the last vinyl record presses were made back in the 80's and how we were just now seeing enough demand to create new technology to replicate something for old technology.
To some extent the vinyl record is the Mexicoke of the music industry - the utility and benefits are arguable, but the consumers are willing to spend more on it (a new CD costs like $11.99, the same album on vinyl can go for over $35 or more) so they keep getting made.
And to some extent if you buy an album on CD you're buying something you can make yourself or you have to turn into the version you want (digital) yourself. If you're going to spend money might as well buy something you can't make yourself, plus as a bonus they tend to come with download codes for the format you really want. Today if you buy physical music to some extent you're buying a souvenir.
But if you're a hipster, the vinyl record becoming mainstream is a problem for you since the whole point is to not be mainstream. So, the next frontier in differentness is cassettes. The pioneer of this for the most part was Urban Outfitters, they've wound up being the exclusive retailer of a number of albums on cassette, like the Run The Jewels album or the Hamilton Mixtape.
So naturally we're now seeing the same problem the vinyl industry faced.
But the sort version to your question is: it's the latest way to be hip and different.
Schnapple
Those are low-quality tapes or low-quality players. High-quality recordings to quality tape played by a good player can have very high audio fidelity -- heck; magnetic tape is a medium recording studios have used predominantly, before the advent of hard drives.
Among other things, it's totally DRM-free; you can't copy protect a baseband audio cassette. Aside from that, the technology is mature and dirt cheap, and actually durable in many ways similar to a printed paper book. If an audio CD gets damaged, it may become totally unplayable; if an audio cassette gets damaged, it may still be playable, and may be repairable to the point of being 100% again. If the shells they're using are held together with screws then it's easy to change shells if they get damaged. If the tape itself gets a damaged section, that section can be cut out and the tape spliced, leaving >99.9% of the original content intact. Damaged tapes, if they can be made playable at least one more time, can be copied, yielding a lower quality end product, but one that is usable. Note that none of this is music to the ears of so-called 'audiophiles' who expect everything to sound like they're hearing it live. There's also the fact that making a 'mix tape' is relatively simple, needing only a playback deck and a record deck; no computer or software required, just time and patience. You can even record things off broadcast radio relatively simply, and 0.125" audio cassette tape has more than enough bandwidth for FM broadcast. Sure, it's not CD quality, not by a longshot, but if all you care about is hearing the music and being entertained by it, and not continually critiquing the quality of the recording, then it's not bad at all.
3 hours? What the hell. I used to overhaul broken VHS and Betamax players from the flea market and 90+ percent of the time the procedure was pull the top, replace the belt(s) (usually cheap O-ring drive belts you can buy by the bag in various sizes), hit the inside with compressed air, then swab the head with alcohol. Whole procedure took 5 minutes. Then I would go back and sell my $10 treasure for $100 the next weekend.