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.
How about reel-to-reel? Unlike cassettes, it actually sounds good. Probably the best you’ll ever hear from an analog format.
Was reel-to-reel ever mainstream?
I always had the impression that it was too complicated and/or expensive for most.
It was always expensive and niche. Only a few commercial releases even at its peek. Most of the machines were used for mastering, not personal listening.
They’re not that complicated. They just look that way when you’re threading the reel through the mechanisms. There’s a logic to it, and it’s pretty easy once you understand that. Does have a little more maintenance than a record player or cassette deck. Stuff needs to be lubed right.
Edit: also, note that people aren’t necessarily buying cassettes or vinyl to listen to them. Lots of vinyl is purchased by people who don’t even own a turntable. It’s for the art and physicality.
Nagra ftw.
Swiftees.
I feel like tape fans were always there, just like vinyl fans. There are some special subcategories of them like Sony Walkman fans for example. Or those who like tape saturation/distortion. In music production it’s even used as an effect sometimes: people pass their whole audio output through tape record and immediate playback just to introduce some of that saturation. Also I’ve always seen niche cassette limited edition releases here and there.
This reminds me of Kung Fury, which has a very 80’s/90’s aesthetic. They tried a variety of ways to filter the final movie to give it the right feel for the time period. Finally, unsatisfied with digital methods, they ended up running it through an actual VCR.
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.
yeah. i wonder why they aren’t binging back VHS too. because it objectively sucks compared to what we have now.
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.
Shit medium that inevitably ends up pulled by a faulty mechanism and destroyed. I remember patching broken tapes with adhesive tape all the time.
Wow, my cars cassette player may finally seen some use!!!
One of the biggest artist in the world using cassettes feels like cultural appropriation lol
It’s perfect for people that like feeling hip more than they actually like music.
I’ve seen a lot of bands doing that at their merch table. I think for most bands, it’s just a keepsake like buying a T-shirt or sticker or whatever after a show. I’m sure there’s plenty of people who prefer cassettes (or at least the Walkman aesthetic) but for the most part, it’s just a souvenir.
I’ve never been into tapes but I collect vinyl. Part of the fun is all the extras tossed in. It’s like buying a boxed set or special edition DVD/Blu-Ray. Tapes don’t really have the same space for fun stuff but Taylor Swift probably has the budget to do something “extra” and make it a whole thing people put on Instagram.
I don’t subscribe to any streaming services. I have vinyls and tapes. If I want to listen to music on the go, I use my walkman with music I’ve recorded from vinyl or, in very rare cases, YouTube.
My 9 year-old has a walkman too and it’s the greatest thing ever. She doesn’t have a smartphone, but the walkman enables her to listen to her own mixtape when we’re traveling. She loves it.
Actually, I’ve seen quite a few people with feature phones around lately, a walkman would be perfect for them for the same reason.
Also, making mixtapes is still as great as it was back then. A playlist is not the same, not by a long shot. I made one for my little sister recently and it was all kinds of fun to make sure both sides were filled, that the mood and energy was cohesive, that it was tracks I genuinely believed she would enjoy but also tracks that I knew she wouldn’t seek out on her own. (Fuck algorithms for recommending music — they won’t challenge you or surprise you.)
Edit: Also, releasing on cassette isn’t even that new this time around. For instance, all of Mac Miller’s stuff has been available on cassette for at least a few years. Like, check out HHV’s listing of cassettes: https://www.hhv.de/en-DK/records/catalog/filter/tape-D2M74N4U9 and https://imusic.dk/exposure/8138/kassettebaand has a surprising number of metal albums on cassette.
How is it any different than making a playlist? You said a long shot, that’s not true.
I am not talking about Spotify, I never use it, but unless you are talking about the level of effort to make the tape, then what’s the difference?
Records are bulky, heavy, and horribly environmentally bad. Cassettes aren’t as bad but are really inconvenient.
I got rid of all of those years ago and I am so glad I did.
I still have a music collection, I don’t use streaming services though. And no no CDs either.
You have no time constraints when making a playlist. It doesn’t have to fit neatly into 2x 30 or 45 minutes. And because it has to fit into that time constraint, it affects the choice of tracks and their placement into the aforementioned flow. Including a track like Herbie Hancock’s Chameleon has a huge impact on a mixtape, but on a playlist it’s just another song.
I just bought a cassette for my favorite band, Mad Routine. I don’t intend to use it, because it’s a special item with a limited run, but I would if I had a spare and a cassette player.
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
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.
Your view is totally fine, but I guess you’re not understanding why people do this. I’m a millennial, around 30. Personally I buy CDs, I buy vinyl, and I even have some stuff on tape. I’ve also recently picked up film photography and among my friends it’s common nowadays to bring some 2000-2010 digicams.
So why? flac is perfect, and streaming services stream whatever high-quality music you’d ever want to play. Film is expensive, and digicams are often way more shit than whatever a modern smartphone that’s already in your pocket can do.
Personally I’ve become bored by perfection, overwhelmed by choice, and frustrated with the lack of owning anything. When I play a physical album I sit down for it, I am focused on the music. I cannot easily choose the music, I’ll just have to accept the order of the album. There are way fewer choices to overwhelm me. Likewise, with film photography, it feels simpler in a way. You shoot a few images in a go, because film isn’t cheap, and you’ll only get to see them weeks later when the roll is developed. No pressure of the perfect shot, no insane resolution to show any imperfection. And mistakes just happen, because you cannot see what you’re doing, so you just have to accept them. Digitally you can just take 20 pictures and take the best one.
So back to music. Why would one prefer vinyl or tape over CD? As a life-long CD collector, I wondered the same thing a few years ago. But when artists that I enjoy started skipping CD releases in favor of vinyl I hopped in, invested in a shit vinyl player, and didn’t really get it. Sure it had a character, but it wasn’t great in any way. After some more research I found out that it was probably just the vinyl player (please don’t get some cheap shit for a 100 bucks with a red unbranded needle). I invested in an Audiotechnica LP70XBT, and oh boy did stuff improve. I finally get it. The sound is gorgeous, though not necessarily better or worse than CD imo. It’s a bit warmer, with detailed bass but less clinical high end. And I love the whole tactile experience of it. Older vinyl definitely sounds worse than modern CD quality though.
I think it’s the whole experience that people enjoy. Putting the vinyl or cassette in the player, having something move and, as if it were magic, suddenly there’s music. With a slightly different character that differentiates it from the clean and clinical sound of high quality digital audio. Modern digital audio is great and definitely has its place, but at times it can feel sterile, too perfect. The crackles and warmth of vinyl, the grain and slightly off colours of photographic film, they feel like they have more personality. They stem from a time where the imperfections of the medium still kinda hid the imperfections of the artist.
(Okay this turned into quite a ramble but I hope there’s something useful in there :3 )
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. :)
That is by design. Unwanted noise is shit. A large part of the electronic pathways were noise and other unwanted signals removers
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 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.
You’ve completely missed the point.
You grew up in a world where the quirks of analog formats were nothing but technical limitations to be overcome. It is true that a FLAC is literally superior in every way to a Vinyl if your value function only takes in cost, quality, and convenience.
HOWEVER Gen Z grew up in a world where music was always cheap and convenient to access. We also (mostly) grew up in a world of touchscreens and always-online gadgets and doodads. My generation’s first portable music player was often the iPod touch. You know what all of that does to a person? It creates a deep craving for tactile feedback. For technology that doesn’t nag with software updates, for music that can’t be “unlicensed” and pulled from your library remotely, for a music player that you can touch and feel and interact with in a more meaningful way than tapping on the little square of glass that already runs our lives. For the little rituals that have been stripped away, like flipping a vinyl at the midway point or rewinding a tape.
The entire point of analog is that it’s “worse”. It’s un-clinical, it’s raw, it’s tactile, it’s physical. Listening to my favorite albums on vinyl is such a better experience than through the disembodied shuffle of my phone. I don’t crave maximum audio fidelity or convenience because I always could have those things literally whenever I want.
You may agree that “cost, quality, and convenience” are pretty damn desirable.
I do agree, and kind of miss, the anticipation for a record release, the listening to the radio (in my case the quality non-commercial programs, think BBC, NPR, and their equivalents) with the finger on the record button, the wonder of buying a new LP, and poring over the jacket, and the occasional included booklet, flipping through records at the store,and many other cool aspects, but I stand by the vastly increased quality and durability.
If you want the rituals (save the fucking chore and expense of cleaning records), CDs are a pretty nice compromise. Tactile, mainly manual, choice of playing linearly, as many artists intended, possibility of programming or shuffling, high quality, and many other choices. With records and even worse, cassettes, you are stuck with the artifacts introduced by a bad medium and bad equipment. Want “warmth”? get a decent tube amp. Better yet, build from as kit. Great experience, and if you want control over sound, buy and learn to use a proper equalizer.
the point is feeling like it’s superior when it objective isn’t as some sort of form of teenage rebellion or something.
not any different in the 90s when everything was CDs and that the few ‘cool’ kids were still using records as a FU to ‘the man’. and wearing 70s clothing styles.
It’s all about making yourself feel special.
Well you hardly have a leg to stand on about “feeling superior” when you’re out here being smug about criticizing harmless tastes.
I don’t see how listening to vinyls in the privacy of my own home is considered performative, but if that’s the only reasoning you’re willing to entertain… Well go right ahead, I thought I made a good case for it but I guess I was wrong and I am buying vinyls for the clout.
I’m not criticizing anything. The fact you feel criticized by my comment… maybe you are doing it performatively… if only for yourself?
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.
I agree. The loudness is not what I dislike the least. Most 1st gen CDs were the work of love of sound engineers and producers, given near miraculous equipment, to produce records with unheard of quality. I own several. Dire straits Brothers in arms is one of these, a truly brilliant recording (The album itself is brilliant) The sound quality is truly astounding.
The whole thing took a downturn when they started compressing the recordings to fit FM frequencies. Why they didn’t do the compression at the FM station, and leave the uncompressed stream for us, is always been a mystery to me.
As for the range, it is generally pointless. Most people, even when young, can’t hear above 20 Khz.
My son is into them. My daughter is into CDs. Both are retro cool, because they are.
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.
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.
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.
There are still new albums occasionally released on 8 tracks too, and even a couple on Edison cylinders. Anachronism is collectable.
