Slashdot Mirror
Cassette Album Sales in the US Grew By 23% in 2018 (billboard.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Thanks to such acts as Britney Spears, Twenty One Pilots and Guns N' Roses, along with soundtracks from the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise -- which boasts the year's top two sellers -- and Netflix's Stranger Things series, cassette tape album sales in the U.S. grew by 23 percent in 2018. According to Nielsen Music, cassette album sales climbed from 178,000 in 2017 to 219,000 copies in 2018. While that's a small number compared to the overall album market (141 million copies sold in 2018), that's a sizable number for a once-dead format. In 2014, for example, cassette album sales numbered just 50,000. But, 20 years before that, back in 1994, when cassettes were still very much a hot-selling format, there were 246 million cassette albums sold that year, of an overall 615 million albums.
Are they buying them to play in dad's 1993 Toyota Camry or the Nakamichi tape deck they inherited? Or do they just enjoy tape hiss, dropouts and/or wow and flutter? Sure, I get tube amps, and I sorta get vinyl records. But cassette tapes? Really?
The nice things about vinyl, cassettes, floppy discs, game modules, minidiscs, CDs, DVDs was that you were sold something TANGIBLE that you can touch, look at, stack or store, find in a random box in your attic and generally feel like you actually OWN. My collection of older PC games - the ones that came in plastic cases with something in them - makes me feel BETTER about spending money than a fucking digital download from Steam/Origin/Uplay. My preferred digital medium would be physical ROM chip with data permanently stored on it. I'd love to go to a media store and pick up some fingernail sized ROM chips with music, films, games on them. That gives me both some PRIVACY and the option to sell 2nd hand or gift to others. I'm sure that if someone really tried, you could probably make 2 Dollar ROMs with 20 to 40 GB capacity. Nobody will do that - the industry doesn't think that broadly - but it sure would be nice.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Are you talking about Sony, TDK, or Maxell all of which are still in business and making cassette tapes?
I recently found some cassettes of a band I played with in the 80s and was considering getting something to play them back on. Much to my surprise there was still a very large selection of new cassette players on the market.