Why we’re seeing the return of the music cassette. Chris Carter reports
Anyone old enough to remember using a pencil to wind the magnetic film back into a chewed-up cassette tape may well wonder why anyone would want to dabble with such antiquated technology. You had to fast forward to get to the song you wanted, usually overshooting the start, and the sound quality had nothing on today’s digital offerings. But it’s precisely the sound, often described as “warm”, that appeals to older collectors as well as a new generation for whom pencils and recorded music hold no connection. “Old guys are buying for their memories. Young people are buying to try. They think it’s trendy,” Stephen Ho, a collector from Hong Kong, tells Larry Ryan in The Guardian.
East Asia has experienced much of the boom in sales. Record shops in Tokyo have been expanding their cassette sections, “signalling a resurgence of compact analogue recording media”, says Megumi Kito on Nikkei Asia. Last September, Tower Records in the Shibuya district multiplied its stock of old and new tapes by a factor of six as sales have continued to grow in recent years. “Cassettes seem to come across to the younger generation as ‘new and cute’ things,” Ko Takeda, who heads the cassette section, tells the paper. Tapes are also cheaper to manufacture than vinyl LPs and that is reflected in retail prices, says Matthew Kronsberg in Bloomberg Businessweek. A new vinyl record can cost $35 in the US, a tape a mere $10, but the latter still provides “a similar analogue experience”. “It may be lower fidelity, but it’s also more playful and more portable,” he says. TV series Stranger Things and blockbuster superhero film Guardians of the Galaxy, both with their depictions of life in the 1980s, h
