When Taylor Swift’s releases her new album, “Life of a Showgirl,” in October, it can be heard on the usual places, including streaming, vinyl and…cassette tape?
The cassette tape was once one of the most common ways to listen to music, overtaking vinyl in the 1980s before being surpassed by CDs. But the physical audio format has become an artifact of a bygone era, giving way to the convenience of streaming.
Or, that’s what many thought.
In 2023, 436,400 cassettes were sold in the United States, according to the most recent data available from Luminate, an entertainment data firm. Although that’s a far cry from the 440 million cassettes sold in the 1980s, it’s a sharp increase from the 80,720 cassettes sold in 2015 and a notable revival for a format that had been all but written off.
Cassettes might not be experiencing the resurgence of vinyls or even CDs, but they are making a bit of a comeback, spurred by fans wanting an intimate experience with music and nostalgia, said Charlie Kaplan, owner of online store Tapehead City.
“People just like having something you can hold and keep, especially now when everything’s just a rented file on your phone,” Kaplan told CNN.
“Tapes provide a different type of listening experience — not perfect, but that’s part of it. Flip it over, look at the art and listen all the way through. You connect with the music with more of your senses,” he said.
it’s actually super common for underground music. I have a collection of new music on cassette. it costs a lot of money to press vinyl, and a lot of bands just aren’t there.
Collectors? Idiots?
Swift is a billionaire. She did not become a billionaire by releasing her albums in single formats. Streaming, cds, multiple collector editions in vinyl and now cassettes. Agree writes music to appeal to the most people possible and then creates as many different sources for her fans to give her money as she can.
I saw a bunch in Japan, along with Vinyl and CD, even saw some 8-track in Tower Records.
I don’t like touch screens, or screens in general. I miss Minidisc so much. It was and is the absolute best for me.
The iPod with the click wheel would be my next choice but they’re too expensive now. CD cases were cumbersome, and when lined up it’s hard to read the spines. They skip too when I’m walking.
I’d go back to cassettes again if they were released to the same standard as back in the day (Dolby NR, etc). I like handling the cases and they look better lined up on a shelf.
Another one of those pointless articles… Cassettes have been on the rise for a couple of years now, and for the same reasons that vinyl has been making a comeback; mainly fake nostalgia and the yearning for true ownership in form of physical media.
As a vinyl snob, listening to music on that medium isn’t better. The quality is at best a little worse than what you get from a CD, it’s inconvenient, bloody expensive and it takes up space.
BUT you get to actually hold the music you love in your hands and listen to it more intently, because you’ve made the effort of putting on a record instead of just pressing play. I like that.
Edit: just realised I just made the same points the article made… oh well. I’ll just continue archiving my CD collection. Not (only) for posterity, but as a big middle finger to the RIAA.
What does fake nostalgia mean?
I don’t think it’s actually a real term, but I kinda mean that it’s nostalgic to people who can’t really have nostalgia for it because they’re too young to have experienced it being the main music format.
Another one of those pointless articles… Cassettes have been on the rise for a couple of years now, and for the same reasons that vinyl has been making a comeback; mainly fake nostalgia and the yearning for true ownership in form of physical media.
No. Cassettes sound like shit. They are a very lossy format. Vinyl actually sounds different in ways that people like. My vinyl collection has nothing to do with nostalgia (I grew up after CDs were on the rise). On a solid system, there’s a lot more fidelity in the bass on vinyl.
Cassettes don’t sound too bad if you actually have good equipment, which most people nowadays don’t (because most can’t afford collector’s prices for decent decks). I was born in 97, vinyl records were long dead by then. Most people who get into vinyl nowadays actually grew up with iPods (hence the term “fake nostalgia”).
On a solid system, there’s a lot more fidelity in the bass on vinyl.
Eh… it’s pretty much all down to mastering, but vinyl records have a limited dynamic range compared to CDs which makes the bass more pronounced maybe? Not something I’ve noticed but I tend to prefer clear high end and mid range anyway.
Also, old records (from early in the CD era) had nowhere near the fidelity of modern records. I played a modern record for my father once and he was astounded how far they’ve come.
There are still new albums occasionally released on 8 tracks too, and even a couple on Edison cylinders. Anachronism is collectable.
Older dude here:
There is no advantage to listening to something on a cassette, except for the vintage brownie points.
I did the analog to digital transition, and miss nothing. There was an intermediate time, when mp3s came along, and people were lowering bitrates to absurd levels, but digital is simply better.
All the people talking wonders about the “warmth”, “tone”, and other supposedly desirable qualities are very mistaken. What they are fawning over is noise, feedback, muddiness, lack of range, lack of definition, and so on. Vinyl records are shit. They make sound by literally scratching something.
The only advantage of tape was, at the time, it’s smaller size and portability, but sound was worse than records. I still have the last deck I owned, a marvel of technology of the time, a double auto-reverse TEAC deck with Dolby and Dbx noise reduction, auto azimuth, programmable, etc, which is objectively shit compared to a decent mp3 player, provided that the music is encoded in lossless, or large enough bitrate.
CDs were a massive improvement, and the pinnacle were DDD CDs, which were Digital recording, Digital mixing, and Digital mastering, meaning very little analog garbage was introduced in the process.
The objective for audio equipment is to be transparent, to not add or detract anything from the original performance.
The only advantage of tape was, at the time, it’s smaller size and portability
And not being read-only.
Also, you could spool them with a pencil.
CDs were a massive improvement, and the pinnacle were DDD CDs, which were Digital recording, Digital mixing, and Digital mastering, meaning very little analog garbage was introduced in the process.
Very little analog garbage… Except for literally every instrument tracked in, including distortion pedals. :)
With CDs they were negatively impacted by the loudness war as it became much more widespread. Having to hunt around for the right recording, often the earlier ones, can be expensive. Normalisation of the recordings by streaming companies is just an awful idea as it doesn’t fix the bad parts of the mix just turns everything down.
I prefer SACDs to CDs, mostly because they tended to be mastered and mixed better than the CDs of the past two decades. The surround audio mixes are mostly just gimmicky, although they are a good fit for some records, but they almost always had a two channel mix that you could pick instead. The higher frequency range is mostly pointless.
All the people talking wonders about the “warmth”, “tone”, and other supposedly desirable qualities are very mistaken. What they are fawning over is noise, feedback, muddiness, lack of range, lack of definition, and so on. Vinyl records are shit. They make sound by literally scratching something.
I moved to all-digital music-making and -listening in the 90s, and agree that a lot of the “analog” benefits are imagined or the result of misunderstandings how technology works.
But I think you’re missing the point. Don’t forget that noise, feedback, muddiness, lack of range, lack of definition are all legitimate effects often intentionally applied to make music sound a certain way.
A cassette is objectively lower quality by sampling rate, reproducibility, etc, but you agree that it affects the sound. At that point, I think you have to admit that a contrary personal preference for cassette or vinyl is valid. It’s not objectively “worse” because many people actually and validly find those “bugs” to be “features.”
It’s fine to like the digital revolution, but I’m just identifying you’re making a value judgement, and others can rightly value differently.
The problem is, every modern cassette deck on the market except for one by TEAC and TASCAM is fucking crap. You’re pretty much stuck using vintage gear which hasn’t held up too well. I had a Pioneer deck that sounded fantastic but broke. Like unfixable because they don’t make the parts anymore. I have a TEAC deck from the '90s that sounds like crap now. I’m just done with it. You have plenty of good choices when buying a new turntable. Where as with cassettes you have two descent ones, and the rest are AIDS.
Edit: Also, the two descent ones are expensive.
Don’t listen to “audiophiles” otherwise literally no audio equipment is ever good, and it becomes a who can spend the most money contest.
A cassette player from FiiO will sound absolutely great and work fine.
Bro it’s $100 and built like a cheap toy. It’s way overpriced if you want to talk about who can spend the most money. Believe it or not, i’m not some rich audiophile. I have an okay DAC and okay headphones. Also, I listen to music through my phone speakers.
A cheap record player or a cheap CD player were always better than a high-end cassette player. Cassettes were designed to be small at the expense of quality at a time when technology didn’t allow things to be both small and high quality, and the constraints of the medium are well within the bounds of what most people can easily hear. Once CDs and their players became cheap, tape was entirely obsolete, and didn’t have the I don’t understand Nyquist Sampling Theorem or acknowledge the existence of dust excuse that vinyl had.
Naturally. But the comment is not comparing tape to other media, so your rant is not relevant. We are talking about tape players.
My son is into them. My daughter is into CDs. Both are retro cool, because they are.
This sound like some type of manipulation.
Not Taylor Swift but my older kid is really into retro music devices. He has a Walkman, a separate tape recorder, a record player and a boom box, and buys vinyl and cassettes
Gen Z is an interesting bunch. Opting for blurry photos and bringing back JNCO jeans.
The 90’s are back.
Blurry photos is fine to make an stylistic choice. The 2019 movie The Lighthouse stylistically looked like a 1920s film, before modern music intentionally used bitcrushing, it used vinyl cracks, boomer shooters made in this decade intentionally look like 1990s Doom clones.
When a medium’s shortcoming is patched by technology, it ultimately becomes an artifact of the era where it was accidental. Once a few years have passed, it becomes more synonymous with the era than the mistake.
It’s not necessarily nostalgia, Gen Alpha and the younger half of Gen Z never grew up without smartphones, so they don’t miss the era of poor film photography. Although every generation does this simulation of forgotten mistakes, it’s particularly poignant now, where the high quality, perfectly lit, professional feeling photos convey something artificial, i.e. smartphone software emulating camera hardware, faces tuned with filters or outright AI generated content. Even if it’s false imperfection, the alternative is false perfection.
Art using deliberate imperfections that were unavoidable in the past is romanticising something perceived as before commercialism, and that’s admirable.
“Blurry photos”? Those are just photos with a shallow depth of field. That never went out of style.
Became harder to do with phones though.
I burned a few CDs and put one of them in my car’s CD player
It worked but I got hit with “tray error” when I tried ejecting it.
It’s been stuck in there since april
That’s the authentic experience
The next level is getting one of those radio tuners, a discman, and explaining to your friends that you use the discman, because the car CD player is broken.
If the car has a cassette player, you can get this cassette with a 3.5 jack coming out of it, and then connect that to the discman to listen to CDs! The 90’s were fun.
Those worked pretty well by the end, tbh
Part of the car now.
“the pre-owned volvo of tourist@lemmy.word” is not as catchy as “The Ship of Theseus”
I showed them all this stuff before and my kids thought it was lame. Their friends start to listen or wear said things and now it’s cool… Kids lol nothing changes.
I did all the trendy thing when I was a kid. Even made the mistake of wearing FUBU once as a white guy.
don’t worry it’s still not cool.
I’m a Millennial/GenZ cusper and I think its just the desire to go back to a simpler analogue lifestyle. I’ve also bought a few cassettes from concerts at times when I couldn’t carry around a full vinyl the rest of the night
i always get them!
I definitely prefer to purchase my music on CD when possible. As someone who grew up with Cassettes, it’s one tech I’m fine with being pushed into history. I’d rather have Minidiscs than cassettes.
Shit medium that inevitably ends up pulled by a faulty mechanism and destroyed. I remember patching broken tapes with adhesive tape all the time.
yeah. i wonder why they aren’t binging back VHS too. because it objectively sucks compared to what we have now.
Brutalmoose is my source for excellent VHS tapes.
VHS isn’t coming back because you simply can’t buy a CRT and VCR. These are no longer being made, the existing ones are degrading and overpriced.
Otherwise they’d absolutely be back, a lot of videos on YouTube and TikTok are specifically longing for VHS.
