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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.
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'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.
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.