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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.
Superior sound quality, duh.
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?
I still have an 8 track player in my very old car... why can't I find any new music for it?
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I think the better question to ask is: WHO is buying the tapes?
I'd be willing to bet it's Boomers and/or Gen-X. I highly doubt it's teens or the 20-year olds given the data:
1, Soundtrack: Guardians of the Galaxy: Awesome Mix Vol. 1 @24,000
2, Soundtrack: Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2: Awesome Mix Vol. 2 @19,000
3, Twenty One Pilots, Trench @7,000
4, Soundtrack: Stranger Things: Music From the Netflix Original Series @5,000
Not everyone wants to pay a streaming tax.
Also, the 219,000 cassette copies sold is like a rounding error for sales of CD's. LOL.
I have no clue what #3 is, but the others listed are all selling on cassettes as a novelty that ties into the retro music (and character) / setting of the corresponding movie / show.
People who wanted to be able to say that they taped over a recording of Britney Spears, Twenty One Pilots, or Guns N' Roses.
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This is great news. Now if I could only get back my '82 Jetta so I could have something to play the cassettes on. I spent two weeks' pay on the sound system in that car and it fuckin' rocked. The car didn't really run all that great, and the heater didn't work, and one of the windows only went halfway down, but man I could bomb the bass in that little fucker. I loved that car. I'll bet if you could vacuum the upholstery you'd find a half-oz of some pretty decent weed I dropped there. It was green and had a 1.7 liter engine that supposedly could put out 74 horsepower, but I'm pretty sure most of those horses were pretty sick, because I really had to stand on that accelerator to merge onto the Kennedy Expressway. Good times.
Now, if you wanna bring back my '75 Honda Civic wagon (also green) with the 8-track player, you'd really have something. I went away to grad school in New York in that bitch and I remember there was a track break smack in the middle of Heroin off Lou Reed Live. It used to drive me crazy. He'd sing "when the blood begins to..." and there'd be like this thunk and 10 second pause while switching tracks before he'd sing, "...flow". It was one of like 4 tapes I had when I left Chicago.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I believe the last company still manufacturing these is National Audio Company. How they are continuing to do this is quite an effort, audio equipment manufacturers no longer make the equipment necessary to manufacture cassettes. A story I watched said they purchase second hand machines and equipment wherever they can to use and cannibalize for parts. All dead forms of media will find a nostalgia movement. 8-tracks are next.
I've heard the distortion from a tube amp and cancel the distortion of the cassette. I've also heard the Earth is flat and vaccines cause autism.
Yea. Since skipping the song takes time and makes the tape pack uneven, I don't do it. On the other hand, when playing music from my phone I start thinking about the next song, maybe I should choose another and so on. I do not do that with tapes, even if I have more than one tape in my car (expecting to drive longer than the tape plays), I listen to both sides of one tape, then insert another.
I've heard very good sound quality from cassettes, if they are the right kind of tape.
It's not the quality of the sound, it's the noise. Even the very best cassettes (and I've fiddled with a variety of them over the years, sometimes even in good decks) feature a crapload of noise. There's just nothing like digital. Maybe it doesn't bother everyone the same, but it definitely bothers me.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
A cassette is MUCH worse quality than a 128kbps MP3. A brand new cassette is only on par with perhaps 22KHz, 8-bit audio. A 128kbps MP3 can sound as good as a CD depending on the source material and how it was encoded.
Ask your grandpa about those windblown piles of tangled cassette tape angrily thrown out of cars when the tape eventually broke or the player mechanism jammed.
Because I still need sweet tunes for my Camaro.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
When I was growing up in the 1980s, I had some interest in books, music, films and other stuff that was "from before my generation" - created in the 1960s or 1970s, or even earlier. I liked being aware of "what came before young me". Things like rotary phones, record players, non-electrical sewing machines, older equipment were interesting to me. I'm guessing that some Millenials are similarly interested in the 20 years that came before them - 1980s pop music, emulated 8-bit or 16-bit era games, audio cassettes, older books and novels, classic 20th Century cinema. Another interesting thing to consider: How do you understand trends properly - extrapolated future trends for example - if you don't look at them through a window of experience that is longer than - say - just 10 to 20 years? Those of us who started computing in the 1980s are actually quite aware of what computing looked like in the 1970s or earlier. Today - 30 to 40 years later - we have enough historical experience to judge what tech trends may come in 2025 or 2028. The fact that I owned a Psion minicomputer with flip-out keyboard, for example, informs my view that at some point in the next 5 to 8 years, a trend in smartphones may be Psion-like smartphones with a QWERTY keyboard you can write a doctoral thesis on. Whereas a Millenial who has only seen touchscreen-touchscreen-touchscreen may have no idea that smartphones with full physical QWERTY keyboards are even useful for anything - junk from "the bad old 1990s". Its a bit like knowing some world history - some stuff that happened 500 years ago can repeat, in slightly altered form, in the 21st Century. With computers or electronics, knowing the last 50 or 60 years is of great benefit in predicting what tech may come along in 10 years. Otherwise you become dependant on what Hollywood shows you in Scifi movies - real world tech won't necessarily evolve like in Minority Report or The Matrix. Even reading decades old patents can be a big eye-opener - some very smart people proposed some pretty amazing inventions in decades past that were never manufactured or sold. Variations on those patent-expired inventions may actually hit the market in the next 10 years. The past can be an indicator of the future.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
There is a big difference in the sound of a pre-recorded mass produced tape and a higher end chrome or metal tape recorded on a decent deck. Pre-recorded were almost always made with cheap normal bias ferric oxide tape which was designed for low-fi purposes like dictation. But, like the Porsche 911, engineers took a bad idea and developed it far beyond what it was ever supposed to do. The audiophile company Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab, best known for half speed mastered high end vinyl, produced a line of cassettes recorded on Nakamichi studio decks from original master recordings. Several of these cassette releases were reported to sound better than their vinyl LP counterparts.
Didn't you guys watch the movie? It was basically just a 2 hour advertisement for the cassette tape format.
The sequel was also plugging the Microsoft Zune. I think the used Zune prices on ebay will be going up.
Wanna know how I know you haven't heard most, (all?) of those albums?
Every one of them is going to have 60s, 70s, and 80s music on them, except for Twenty One Pilots, which is a recent thing.