A Museum of Portable Sound Investigative Report
Cassettes! Remember them? They used to be popular, then CDs came along and ‘killed them off’, but suddenly from out of nowhere they’re ‘really popular’ again: this is one of the most often regurgitated tropes of English-speaking journalism over the past two decades. Don’t believe us?
Check out our timeline of published news stories below (sorted most recent to oldest), all of which celebrate the supposed ‘cassette comeback’ – sometimes multiple pronouncements by the same publication in the same year.
Stretching back to 1997(!), the dozens of articles listed below document the media’s obsession with the fact that some people – a genuinely small number of people, as only a few of the articles will admit – still purchase and/or use compact cassettes.
Seen a story about the so-called ‘cassette comeback’ that’s not on our list? Let us know about it!
14 June 2024 | Moneyweek.com
Are music cassettes making a comeback?
Music cassettes offer nostalgia to many, but are the ‘new and cute’ thing for the younger generation. Are they worth investing in?
10 June 2024 | SAGA (UK)
Why cassette tapes are making a comeback and 5 ways to listen to them
Music lovers are harking back to the Eighties, as cassette tapes see a 20-year-peak in sales.
7 June 2024 | National Public Radio (US)
The cassette tape is making a comeback thanks to a family-run company in Missouri
Despite the odds, cassette tapes are making a comeback. And one family-owned company in Springfield, Missouri is a leader in the revival.
26 May 2024 | CNet
How Cassettes Are Making a Comeback in 2024: Best Portable Players Compared
Look out, vinyl, here comes the newest analog challenger. You can still buy blank tapes, too!
18 May 2024 | Bloomberg UK
Cassette Tapes Are Getting a Boost From an Unexpected Source
And there are new retro-styled portable players to listen right along.
14 February 2024 | MarketWatch
Why cassette tapes are making a comeback — and it’s not just a fad
Cassettes may be dinosaurs technologically, yet they continue to flourish just below the surface of popular culture as a means of recording and listening to music
11 February 2024 | Nikkei Asia
Cassette tapes are making a surprise comeback in Japan
Streaming generation charmed by the low-fi warmth of analog audio
1 June 2023 | PBS NewsHour (US)
Cassette tapes make unexpected comeback in era of music streaming
It’s a resurgence similar to that of vinyl records, albeit on a much smaller scale
9 May 2023 | New York Post
Gen-Z Fuelling a Cassette Comeback
Gen Z is crazy for cassettes — and there’s a $3,700 wannabe Walkman
19 April 2023 | ITV UK
Cassette tapes are making a comeback
Get your pencils ready, because cassette tapes are officially making a comeback
19 April 2023 | Daily Mail UK
First a vinyl revival, now a cassette comeback…
Sales of tapes hit a two-decade high as music lovers turn to traditional formats
27 February 2023 | Billboard Magazine
Unwinding the Birth, Rise, Fall and Return of the Cassette Tape
Two decades after most music fans pressed the Eject button, cassettes are following vinyl’s comeback in stores and stereos
1 February 2023 | Billboard Magazine
Cassettes Are Making a Comeback, But Can Production Keep Up?
While the format’s popularity pales next to vinyl, it’s enjoyed a 443% sales increase in the last seven years – good news for a small number of manufacturers
February 2023 | International Musician
Vinyl Album Sales Break Record, Cassettes and CDs Make a Comeback
Cassette sales in the US continue to grow
Read Article
More than 2.2 million vinyl albums were sold in the week ending December 22. This marks the single largest sales week for vinyl albums since Luminate Data began electronically tracking music sales in 1991.
The top-selling vinyl album of the week was Midnights, by Taylor Swift of Local 257 (Nashville, TN), which sold 68,000 copies—the third-largest sales week of the year for an album on vinyl. Vinyl album
sales made up 57% of overall album sales in the US in the week ending December 22 (2.232 of 3.897 million) and 63% of all physical album sales (2.232 of 3.526 million). Overall album sales combine both physical and digital download album purchases. Physical album sales include vinyl albums, CDs, cassettes, and other physical formats. Year-to-date vinyl album sales stand at 41.891 million—up 3.6% compared to 2021.Cassettes and CDs are not far behind in garnering renewed interest. It started with vinyl shortages and long manufacturing lead times. But even as those issues improve, cassette sales in the US continue to grow, according to Luminate. Last year, sales grew 28% to 440,000 units, up from 343,000 in 2021. The bestselling cassette of 2022 was Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Soundtrack Vol. 2 at 17,000 units—a significant number, particularly for independent artists and labels whose physical sales are a major portion of their revenue. Last year, CD sales grew for the first time in 20 years. According to RIAA data, CD sales jumped to 46.6 million in 2021—a 47.7% increase from 2020.
14 January 2023 | How-To Geek
Did You Know Cassette Tapes Are Making a Comeback?
Are cassette tapes the new vinyl?
17 December 2022 | New Scientist
Memories on Magnetic Tape
We are generating stupendous amounts of data and much of it is stored in a surprising way, discovers Becca Caddy
23 October 2022 | Rolling Stone Magazine
NDAs, Obsessive Buyers, and $400 for Sublime: Inside the Baffling Revival of the Cassette Tape
Thanks to major pop acts like Billie Eilish and Lady Gaga, the nearly extinct format is on an unexpected comeback tour. But who’s buying and playing the 20th-century relics?
19 October 2022 | Nikkei Asia
Cassette tape revival turns old trash into new treasure
Musicians and fans like its affordability and physical qualities in a digital world
20 July 2022 | Radio Today Australia
Cassette tapes make a comeback
Move over vinyl. Cassettes are making a comeback
16 July 2022 | CBC Edmonton
Cassettes are making a comeback — but in Edmonton, they never went away
‘It’s the currency of music in the city’
21 April 2022 | RTE
Are cassette tapes making a comeback?
It seems we should all have our pencils at the ready to spool the tape back into our cassette tapes
19 April 2022 | The Globe and Mail Canada
The music cassette tape revival is in full rewind mode
Hipsters have a new niche musical toy. But why is the rewind button being pressed now?
12 May 2021 | GearPatrol.com
Classic Cassette Tapes Are Making a Comeback
The cassette tape’s rewind isn’t just vinyl all over again
27 April 2021 | BBC North West
Why are cassette tapes making an unexpected comeback?
Take a trip down memory lane at Mars Tapes in Manchester, which is believed to be the last tape shop in the UK
28 March 2021 | Forbes
Global Revival Of Cassettes Has Flourished During The Pandemic
The Cassette comeback is increasing in pace
10 February 2021 | Vice.com
Cassette Tapes Are Making a Comeback in Japan
At the heart of the trend are members of Gen Z, many of whom were not even alive when cassette tapes filled record stores
19 January 2020 | Forbes
The Walkman And Cassette Tapes Are Making A Comeback
There is only one company in Europe which still makes cassette tapes
6 August 2019 | Los Angeles Times
Cassette tapes are making a comeback. But it’s about the culture, not the sound
Sales of cassette music tapes climbed 23% in the U.S. last year
21 July 2019 | WIRED UK
Features our Museum Director!
The unlikely cassette comeback isn’t over yet: sales are up in 2019
UK cassette sales are at their highest levels for more than a decade. By the end of 2019 it’s predicted 75,000 tapes will be sold. But tapeheads don’t care if the redux stays small scale – that’s part of the charm
9 July 2019 | Cambridgeshire Live
Are music cassettes ready for a comeback?
Nearly 50,000 cassettes were sold last year – the highest volume for 15 years
25 March 2019 | CTV News
Back to the future: cassette tapes launch comeback tour
The humble cassette is back, joining vinyl as a darling of audiophiles who miss side A and side B
23 February 2019 | The Observer
It’s cool to spool again as the cassette returns on a wave of nostalgia
Sales are soaring and current stars are releasing tracks on the format… but is anyone actually listening to them?
February 2018 | International Musician
Cassettes Make Comeback
Pushing sales are nostalgia for the 1980s created by Guardians of the Galaxy and Stranger Things
Read Article
According to Nielsen Media Research’s annual Music Year-End Report 2017, cassette tape sales had their strongest year since 2012. Though still a niche format, in 2016 sales rose 74% to 129,000 units and in 2017 sales were up another 35% to 174,000 units. Pushing these sales are nostalgia for the 1980s created by Guardians of the Galaxy and Stranger Things, both of which prominently featured the format. Guardians of the Galaxy soundtracks led 2017 sales, followed by the Stranger Things, Volume 1.
28 November 2017 | ABC News Australia
Cassette tapes making a comeback thanks to young, independent artists
‘It’s all about bringing back that vintage, slow listening kind of thing’
25 November 2017 | New Scientist
One comeback too far?
In a Spotify world, why would anyone want to reprise flimsy tape cassettes, asks Paul Marks.
22 November 2017 | Marketplace.org
Cassette tapes make a comeback
Cassettes have made a such a big comeback that manufacturers cannot keep up with demand
8 November 2017 | Sky News
Cassette tapes make a comeback – test your knowledge in our quiz
As sales of old-fashioned cassette tapes grow, find out how much you remember about this 80s and 90s classic in our quiz.
19 May 2017 | The Christian Science Monitor
Cassette comeback: For fans, ‘a yearning for something you can hold’
The generation raised on an everything-digital media diet is heralding the revival of the tangible.
8 May 2017 | Forbes
Cassettes Are Making A Comeback, But Which Artists Are Actually Selling Them?
Everything that was once old becomes cool again, even if it is inconvenient and outdated
9 March 2017 | The Wall Street Journal
Why Cassette Tapes Are Making a Comeback
How Justin Bieber, The Weeknd and other artists are sending the humble cassette tape on a comeback tour. Plus: Mix tapes in the movies
28 October 2016 | The Straits Times
Cassettes making a comeback in South-east Asia as retro-cool image, low cost draw older crowds, newer listeners
For older music fans, the cassettes bring back fond memories of home-made mix tapes
8 October 2016 | CBC Canada
Are cassettes coming back like vinyl? Doesn’t really sound like it
Retro format celebrated for nostalgic objects, but the music usually comes from downloads
26 May 2016 | CBC Canada
From near-extinction to retro cool, cassettes make a comeback
More P.E.I. musicians releasing their music on tape
24 March 2016 | Forbes
Forget Vinyl, Let’s Talk About The Cassette Comeback
Tangibility. Affordability. Immediacy.
14 March 2016 | CBC Canada
Are cassette tapes making a comeback?
Mainstream acts are re-embracing decades-old format, says co-curator of new exhibit
11 March 2016 | Asian Pacific Post
The great cassette comeback in Asia
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March 2016 | Director Magazine
Cassettes and Comebacks
Here’s a look at other antiquated formats and their chances of a revival…
12 February 2016 | BBC News
Are cassette tapes making an unexpected comeback?
Cassette tapes could be making a comeback despite being killed off by CDs in the 1990s
23 December 2015 | The New York Times
The Curious Comeback of Cassettes
Our Misplaced Nostalgia for Cassette Tapes
14 September 2015 | Fortune.com
Audiocassettes are making a comeback
National Audio Company, a Missouri-based cassette maker, had its best year of sales since it opened its doors nearly 40 years ago, Bloomberg reports.
23 October 2014 | Herald Sun (Melbourne)
Cassette Comeback
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7 May 2014 | International Business Times
Music Lovers, Throw Your iPods Away, Walkman to Make a Comeback With the Introduction of a Mega Memory Cassette
Would this also lead to the revival of the Betamax?
Read Article
TheFineBros, which posted a video on YouTube that became viral – with over 8 million views in 3 weeks – on young people’s reaction to the cassette recorder, may have to make another video soon.
Probably an instructional for young people how to use a Walkman or other cassette players.
Forbes reports that cassette players such as Sony’s iconic Walkman may soon be fashionable again and it might be the turn soon of the iPod to become a technology relic. The reason is Sony’s announcement of a new method of data storage that uses magnetic tape that could hold 1498GB per inch.
The Japanese electronic giant unveiled the new technology on Tuesday at the International Magnetics Conference in Europe.
Given the new technology, it means prototype cassettes could hold 185TB of data in a single cassette tape, more than five times the capacity of a prototype cassette that could hold 35TB of data made in 2012 by a collaboration between FujiFilm and IBM. It also dwarfs the average Blu-Ray disc, which could hold 50GB of data and the standard PC’s hard drive of 1TB.
Tech Web site Consequenceofsound.net estimates such kind of tape could hold 64.75 million songs based on an average length of 3 minutes per song. That means one single cassette tape would last the owner 134,896 days or almost 370 years.
It could even place the entire U.S. Library of Congress, which is about 10 total TB, 18.5 times inside one tape
The introduction of the CD killed the cassette tape market, which until the 1990s, was selling 442 million tapes but eventually dwindled to only 274,000 tapes by 2007 that album producers eventually no longer made them.
Although reports said that the tape would soon be available for commercial sale, Gizmondo stressed that the super tape was developed for long-term, industrial-sized data backup and not mainly for music, game, video storage and playback.
With the technology, expect tech companies to race in producing again cassette players, even perhaps including giants Apple and Samsung which specialise in smartphones and tablets.
Would this also lead to the revival of the Betamax?
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October 2012 | Details Magazine
Rewind: The Cassette Makes a Comeback
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27 December 2011 | The Wall Street Journal
Will Cassette-Tapes Make a Comeback?
In an age of digital downloads, cassette tapes are an endangered species. But some audiophiles won’t give up on tangled tape and fuzzy hiss. WSJ’s Lauren Rudser reports.
1 September 2011 | TVB Europe
Is tape making a comeback?
Richard Dean reports from a recent conference exploring the potential of the latest LT05 archive tape format with a drag-and-drop Linear Tape File System
Read Article
It’s not often that a conference starts with the answer and goes on to discuss the questions, as it is usually the other way around. But that pretty much describes the nature of the recent “Why choose LTO5 and LTFS (Linear Tape File System) right now?’ event at the business centre above Liberty House in London, organised by Soho-based company ERA, which specialises in the deployment of new hardware and software-based technology for the film and television industry.
It could have been seen as little more than a triumph in PR stage management, were it not for the fact that the topic under scrutiny is one where everyone involved craves a common and enduring format — archive.
The quest began decades ago when owners started migrating their precious archive material from film or obsolete video tape Rod Allen: “Archive has to last at ieast 40 to 50 years, which is far longer than the normal life of iT formats” formats such as Ampex Quadruplex (Quad) 2-inch and the Ampex/Sony 1-inch type C to digital video tape (VT).
For example BBC Archives, which moved its more than 650,000 hours of video and 350,000 hours of audio to a purpose-built centre in Perivale earlier this year, began using Panasonic D3 from the early 1990s, while the British Film Institute has been transferring Quad to Sony Digital Betacam
(DigiBeta) for 10 years and type C tapes for five.However as John Zubrzycki, Archives Research section leader at the BBC pointed out, these formats may be digital, but they are not file-based. The distinction was an important one, said ERA’S Rod Allen, as today’s workflows demand that archive content must be available as files.
The problem is that files come from the world of IT, where specifications change with such bewildering rapidity as to make the video industry — once mocked for its frequent format changes — look like a paragon of restraint. “Archive has to last at least 40 to 50 years, which is far longer than the normal life of IT formats,” said Allen.
Yo-Yo effect
Martin Greenwood, Director at YoYotta — the company behind the YoYo standalone organising software — demonstrated the point with a whirlwind tour of IT-based storage formats over the last 40 or so years. Since 1977 the capacity of affordable (meaning non-mainframe) storage media has mushroomed from a few hundred kilobytes on Compact Cassette or floppy disk through to hard disk drive (HDD) offering a few tens of megabytes in the 1980s, he told attentive industry delegates, with the removable 100MB Zip drive and 700MB CD-R in 1995 followed by DVD-R and Blu-ray discs and USB memory sticks storing several gigabytes. Meanwhile with the capacity of a single HDD quadrupling to 2TB over the last five years, huge storage capacity can be achieved with a multiple disk array.
“The temptation is to put all the files from multiple sources into folders on a SAN or shared RAID assembly, along with any USB material brought in by the client.” said Greenwood. “However it
soon becomes difficult to find what you want, and the idea of YoYo is to work in the middle to control and organise content.”Zubrzycki noted that even minor changes in computer based storage can have the devastating effect of generating ‘cannot read file” or other fatal error messages. “We all know that tape cassettes can occasionally malfunction, but an IT mismatch can be extremely difficult to fix.” he said.
This could cause havoc anywhere, but especially at BBC Archives where content — of which 95% is for internal BBC use — is supplied to customers within 24 hours. What was needed was a multi-vendor, open source and interoperable system rather than a niche ‘archive’ system plus reliable back-up, said Zubrzycki, adding that archive libraries have an enlightened self-interest on working together to make this happen.
“The answer is the new LTO5 (Linear Tape Open) format with LTFS,” said Allen, “as once archive content is on LTO, it”s here to stay.” After reading the conference title, such assertions came as no great surprise – but what exactly is LTO and how has it improved?
“The LTO format was introduced by Hewlett-Packard. IBM and Seagate Technology (now Quantum Corporation) in 2000 with 100GB of auto-verified after-write storage, since increased to 1.5TB with the launch of LTO5 in mid 2010, with a roadmap to 12.8TB,” said Greenwood. “Using IBM’s LTFS open source software, LT05 supports Linux, Mac and Windows operating systems and drag and drop desktop file access, with a dual partition structure differentiating the directory structure including extended attributes (Index partition) from actual content (Data partition).”
Structured storage
Zubrzycki described the significance of structured storage. “Storing the directory and file structure of LTFS on tape makes for easy navigation, and also avoids the ‘which version of TAR’ (Tape ARchive) problem. With up to 30 programmes stored on one tape, LTO5 has a far higher storage capacity than VT, and is ecologically green when not being accessed, compared to spinning hard drives for example.”
According to Greenwood, the fact that LTFS can accommodate not only the files but also scripts, subtitles, GPS data, opens up the possibility of using LT05 for production, where metadata such as the LLFT (look-up table), software version and unique ID from a camera such as the new ARRI Alexa V4 for example is stored alongside the content.
While the throughput of LTO5 is currently too slow to capture high definition in realtime, its l40MBps i/o speed is tantalisingly close to the 200MBps required. “The current rate allows faster than realtime reading and writing of several camera formats including QuickTime ProRes and MXF DNxHD, and the next generation hardware on the LTO roadmap will have the speed for realtime uncompressed high definition,” claimed Greenwood.
Incidentally his company name comes from the highest scientific unit — the Yottabyte – representing 1OB24. “That”s enough to store 158m years of uncompressed HDTV, which is quite a lot of daytime viewing,” he quipped.
Zubrzycki noted that the metadata requirements for production differ to those for archive, and it was important to perform ‘de-duplication” to maintain clarity. “We are also developing audio/video recognition software to assist retrieval, as well as restoration files where post production processing is recorded while the original is preserved.”
Meanwhile a perennial problem of evolving formats is the generation of concatenation errors when transcoding from the last format to the present many times over. “An alternative is ‘mezzanine coding”,” said Zubrzycki, “where a basic compression scheme is maintained from which later versions can be created, rather than subjecting content to the more severe artefacts introduced by repeated reversions to baseband.”
Earlier this year a European non-profit PrestoPRIME organisation was founded by the BBC, INA (l’Institut National de l’Audiovisuel) in France, Beeld en Geluid (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision), ORF (Österreichischer Rundfunk) of Austria and Italy’s RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana), he added, charged with the task of researching and developing practical solutions for the long-term preservation of digital media objects, programmes and collections. See http://www.prestoprime.org.
SIDEBAR
Storage case studies
Paul Collard, VP Film and Digital Services at 142 Deluxe, described how his company has developed a workflow using the Grass Valley Spirit TS1 PI scanner, YoYo software and a proprietary workflow tool for use in large film digitisation projects.
Under the old method, typically when 16mm was being transferred to DigiBeta, metadata was stored on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet detailing the reel number, length and so on. With LTFS, additional information such as the scanner model can be logged on a ‘metadata enriched” web-based workflow tool storing data in XML format.
The DPX (Digital Picture Exchange format originally based on Kodak Cineon) images are held on a high-speed SAN until checked for QC, then written along with the XML data to two LTO copies, of which one goes to the client.
Jim Duncan, chief engineer at JCA.tv, described how the company, created by a BBC Enterprises management buy-out in 1990, was originally a traditional video distribution house using DigiBeta as the international format. “However the last few years have seen a steady shift to file workflows,” said Duncan, “with all the nightmares of portable drives. different power supply voltages, formats and form factors which that entails.”
Noting that remote spinning disk storage is effectively charged by the kWhr, Duncan said that content is more efficiently stored on a tape shelf. The ‘light bulb moment’ came when Peter Jones of FOR-A demonstrated the LTR IOOHS, the first LTO drive to behave like a VTR. “In a way things have turned full circle with LT05 drives being used in individual production suites, as was the case with DigiBeta,” said Duncan. “This methodology makes sense because it cuts down on the traffic being passed through increasing congested SAN networks.
“Sending an LTO by plane is also often quicker than a data transfer, which again brings us back to the ‘data in a box’ concept.” This sounds like an updated version of the old riddle, ‘Which local area link has the biggest broadcast bandwidth? Answer: A van stacked full of video tapes.”
“With its open source platform and no third-party proprietary software to worry about, we also think that LTO5/LTFS will create a competitive market to the benefit of all,” added Duncan.
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6 October 2010 | National Public Radio, US
Cassette Tapes Make A Comeback … Kind Of
Most of us throw away our old tapes, but some music labels are bringing them back
7 August 2010 | City News (Brisbane)
Cassette the comeback kid
Could cassettes rise like a phoenix and bury the iPod?
Read Article
COULD cassettes rise like a phoenix and bury the iPod?
Maybe not, but just like fluoro hues, skinny jeans and the film Karate Kid, the 80s fad is back in a big way, according to a Brisbane record label.
Lawrence English, director of Kelvin Grove-based label Room 40, said there was growing demand from music enthusiasts for releases on tape.
So to celebrate the label’s 10th anniversary, it will release “mix tapes” of its artists.
“The
y(have) really picked up over the past two years,” he said. In America there are a lot of cassette-only labels.“With cassettes, it’s a really linear listening experience.
“You have to listen to track two to get to track three so you spend more time listening to an album when it’s on cassette.”
After years of removing cassette players from cars and stereos, people were now going out and buying new ones, Mr English said.
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29 March 2010 | The Guardian
Return of the audio cassette
Just when you thought it was dead, the audio cassette is catching the imagination of music fans again. So what’s making us pause and rewind?
23 April 2010 | The New York Times Magazine
Hitting Rewind on the Cassette Tape
Cassette imagery seems to be a good bit more durable than the medium itself
Read Article
By Rob Walker
Over the last couple of years, sales of vinyl records increased; the numbers aren’t huge, but they sparked a lot of public musing about the format’s qualities. Cassette sales, meanwhile, steadily dwindled to a mere 34,000 last year through the retail venues tracked by SoundScan. Considering this not long ago, I concluded that the romance associated with vinyl doesn’t apply to its longtime analog rival. I was wrong about that. In looking (and asking) around online, I realize now that there is extensive evidence of ongoing appreciation for the cassette — or at least the idea of the cassette.
Part of what changed my mind was a long essay on the Web site Pitchfork. In that essay, Marc Hogan noted the cassette’s stunning fall from prominence (8.6 million sold in 2004), but only as a preamble to declaring that a “netroots resurgence” is fueling a cassette “comeback.” The essay pointed to examples of indie labels that are now releasing tapes, sometimes exclusively, and noted a variety of aesthetic and cultural rationales for what could certainly be construed as a willfully perverse stance in favor of a format that hardly anybody seemed excited about during its actual heyday. Perhaps because of Pitchfork’s distinctly music-crit worldview (“One sound that helped was chillwave aka glo-fi aka hypnagogic pop,” etc.), I wasn’t fully convinced. But I was interested.
Another essay, on the Web site PopMatters, argued flatly against a nostalgia-driven cassette revival. “As a canvas, the cassette just didn’t have the majesty of records” and is thus dying unmourned, Sean McCarthy wrote. It’s true that “the record” (or “the album”) retained its status as the core artistic form. Nobody ever looked forward to Prince’s “next cassette” or drew up a list of the “greatest cassettes of all time.” People go to (or miss) record stores, not cassette stores; the store in Nick Hornby’s “High Fidelity” is called Championship Vinyl, not Championship Plastic. And so on.
Still, what struck me as I looked into the status of the tape in 2010 wasn’t so much examples of music still being released on cassette; it was the surprising number of representations of cassettes. Prints and paintings of cassettes; pouches, belt buckles and notebooks made to look like cassettes; buttons with little cassette images on them; envelopes, a watch, even a soap dispenser decorated with the familiar cassette shape. Many artists and designers — too many to name them all here — have chosen cassettes as raw material. Brian Dettmer has fashioned cassettes into a skull, among other forms. An artist identified on Flickr as iri5 has made astonishing portraits of rock musicians from tape carefully extracted from cassettes. Alyce Santoro has created “sonic fabric” neckties that incorporate recycled tape. Designers at Transparent House make impressive lamps with repurposed cassettes (in a direct “tribute to an object of their ’80s youth”). Marc Jacobs and Urban Outfitters have both created U.S.B. drives in the shape of a cassette; a British firm called Suck UK makes a sort of container for a U.S.B. drive that’s not only cassette-shaped but has an old-school foldout cover so you can write out the names of songs collected on the drive.
It’s worth noting here that one thing Hornby’s characters did with their records was . . . make tapes. The medium, crummy as it was, gave listeners a modicum of control. Some of that control had to do with portability — you could obsessively listen to your favorite artists without being yoked to a record player. The PopMatters essay noted that the Walkman let music fans escape into a mobile and private listening world; I would say the boombox and the car cassette deck were just as important in creating mobile and social ones. But using these tools to hear a custom-built musical sequence meant even more.
Sure, we have practically unlimited control at our fingertips now — a few clicks and drags make it easy to whip together a batch of songs and make it available to the world at large if you want to. But that’s just the point. When I floated this topic on the Consumed Facebook page and my Web site, Murketing, my correspondents reminisced about the cassette version of making and sharing as a “ritual”; the process “involved a level of engagement for both the maker and recipient” that can’t be matched by more convenient computer-enabled methods. “To receive a mixtape from a lover . . . ,” one wrote, not quite completing the thought or needing to. It seems the romance of the cassette is strongest in its connection to actual romance: the carefully picked batch of songs transformed a sorry piece of plastic into a precious object. A recent collection of writing about mixtapes is called “Cassette From My Ex,” but the music writer Rob Sheffield’s memoir of courtship, marriage and loss sums it up best: “Love Is a Mix Tape.”
Maybe this is why cassette imagery seems to be a good bit more durable than the medium itself. Tapes are an ex, and this romance isn’t really about wanting the past to come back; it’s about wanting to keep remembering it, fondly.
29 December 2009 | The Daily Mail
Making a comeback… THE CASSETTE TAPE
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By CLAIRE COLEMAN
IT’S technology gone into rewind. Just when digital music players such as iPods were heralding the death of the CD, up pops news that cassettes, of all things, are making a comeback.
For most of us, cassettes are inextricably linked with taping your favourite songs from the radio and the horror when the dodgy car tape player chewed up your favourite album.
It seems internet retailer Amazon received so many requests for a taped version of an album called Words For You — where actors including Joanna Lumley read poetry by the likes of William Wordsworth and John Betjeman over classical music — that Island Records released 4,000 cassette versions, which promptly sold out.
A host of record companies are considering releasing some of their titles on cassette, too. Call us cynical, but we can’t help thinking that the music companies, who are apparently losing money thanks to new technology and music piracy, must be delighted that somebody is still buying music from them.
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14 December 2009 | The Daily Mail
The cassette tape winds its way back to popularity
Cassette tapes are making a comeback because pensioners are rejecting new technology
16 November 2009 | Evening Standard
Fast Forward Cassettes
They’re clunky, easily damaged and the sound quality is appalling but the cassette is having a style comeback.
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By: Ravneet Ahluwalia
THEY’RE clunky, easily damaged and the sound quality is appalling but the cassette is having a style comeback. The video for pop puppet Mika’s single We Are Golden opens with a shot of a cassette in a huge ghettoblaster, on which he presses play. Topshop, Urban Outfitters and Accessorize are hawking cassettethemed knick-knacks and Maxell says sales of blank tapes are significantly up.
The revival started as an indie trend earlier this year when bands Dirty Projectors, Deerhunter, Sky Larkin and F***ed Up all released material on cassette. London-based Holy Roar records has produced a limited-edition Christmas mix tape for the past three years. Co-owner Alex Fitzpatrick says: “There is certainly an element of kitsch to the format, it holds memories for those who were young in the Eighties and early Nineties.”
Todd Hart produces the music blog Dalston Oxfam Shop where he finds rare tapes and posts the tracks online. He says he always found cassettes were a huge untapped resource. “There are a lot of tracks on tape that never came out anywhere else.”
So are cassettes set to be as collectable as records? “They will never be a mass-market format again so the design and packaging is already being fetishised,” says Fitzpatrick. “Which is what happened to vinyl.”
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2 May 2009 | The Telegraph
Rewind to the 1980s as the cassette tape makes a comeback
Audio cassettes, which were cast aside in the digital revolution by the arrival of Compact Discs and internet downloads, are making a comeback.
May 2007 | Modern Painters
Just Press Play
It’s not a comeback – cassettes never went away in the first place.
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PP44-46
By Alan Licht
Like the British and Roman empires, cassettes once ruled the world, both as blank media and as a format for prerecorded music. Not only did they appeal to the masses—tapes outsold vinyl by the late ’80s—but they were also an important tool for DIY-minded postpunk musicians. Case in point: Dennis Duck Goes Disco, a 1977 cassette created by the eponymous Duck, drummer in the rock hand the Dream Syndicate and member of the late-’70s improvised music collective L.A.F.M.S, (Los Angeles Free Music Society). The cassette documents Duck’s experiments using a particular manual turntable with a short spindle, which allowed normal LPs to be placed at angles instead of level, causing wobbly changes in pitch. Using mostly children’s and novelty records, he let the records skip to create loops, as Christian Marclay would do a short time later, although Duck’s efforts are more hypnotic, probably because he was using only one record and turntable at a time. The 20 cassette copies he made of his experiment were never sold, just handed out to friends.
The still-novel format Duck chose for this limited release would be more fully embraced hy his successors in the noise underground of the ’80s and ’90s. Cassettes’ lo-fi quality fit and even enhanced the fried, fuzzed-out sonics of the music while reflecting the DIY ethos and self-imposed marginalization of the scene (not to mention its fatalism — it’s as if the artists didn’t feel their creations worthy of enshrinement on last-forever vinyl). Noise artists could release as many as 20 homemade cassettes for every vinyl LP they could afford to put out. Broken Flag was a highly independent, musician-run ’80s British noise (called “power electronics” back then) label that released nearly 100 albums on cassette, introducing the world to Ramleh, Controlled Bleeding, and the young Tim Gane (who went on to form Stereolab in the ’90s). Broken Flag: A Retrospective 1982-1985, a whopping five-LP box set reissuing much of this legendary material—which was barely available to begin with—has just been unleashed by the German label Vinyl-On-Demand, which specializes in reissuing obscure cassette-only material (but only on vinyl). Meanwhile, Duck’s 1977 cassette is out on both vinyl and CD, having been recently released hy Poo-Bah, a record store in LA that Duck and some of his cronies worked at back in the ’70s, which has recently started issuing records.
The Duck and Broken Flag reissues also speak to a current fascination with rediscovering “lost” records. This is surely one of the ripples caused by the 1996 CD reissue of Harry Smith’s groundbreaking 1952 six-LP collection of obscure blues and folk recordings The Anthology of American Folk Music (Smithsonian Folkways). The Broken Flag box proves just as instructive in showing the roots of Wolf Eyes, Carlos Giffoni, and the rest of the current noise scene as the Smith reissue was in showing the roots of Bob Dylan, John Fahey, the Fugs, et al. The reformatting of cassette material also mirrors the Anthology’s transference of old 78s (which were as antiquated in the early ’50s as cassettes are now) to then-new LPs. But the release of these cassettes on vinyl, itself deemed obsolete in some quarters but considered to be a better archival format than either cassette or CD, demonstrates a continuing Unabomber-like resistance on the part of the underground to the digital world.
Which is ironic, because, as the personal computer would later do in a more all-encompassing way, cassettes took technology out of the hands of the high priests (of the recording studio, in this case) and put it into those of the consumer. Introduced in Europe in 1963 and the US the following year, cassettes were low quality and originally intended for dictation. Most of their early use involved recording conversations—witness Andy Warhol’s 1968 novel A and, subsequently, Interview magazine (not to mention the Watergate tapes). But it wouldn’t be long before people started to record themselves playing music. In the recent documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston, much of Johnston’s adolescence in the 1970s, including arguments with his parents, is accessed via recordings he made on old cassette tapes. Johnston went on to record extensively on cassette, releasing a series of them before working with several indie labels and ultimately landing a contract with Atlantic Records.
Cassettes also marked the first step toward portable music, ushering in the Sony Walkman and boomboxes. In addition to supplementing the transistor or car radio’s mobile music, cassettes put the power of the DJ in anyone’s hands. Mix tapes made being a DJ personal and concrete; as Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore points out in his 2004 book Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture, they were often used as a kind of love letter, either to convey something about one’s tastes that would appeal to the designated object of affection or to express an understanding of that person’s tastes: the mix tape as Cyrano de Bergerac. Or, as Moore puts it, “the toughest cowpoke can express his gooey love vibe without losing an iota of man-stench, just by flowing his babe a mix tape with any sweet beat from the Shangri-Las to Whitehouse.”
Now, of course, iPods have replaced Walkmans and even Discmans as the portable music technology of choice, and people download MP3s instead of taping albums or singles. CDs have replaced not only vinyl and other prerecorded formats but blank cassettes as well (the recordable CD is even cheaper than cassettes used to be and has far better sound quality, although blank cassettes are still sold in stores). Despite the advantage of being able to hold 120 or even 180 minutes of music (as opposed to 80 minutes on a CD), it was always laborious to fast-forward a cassette past a track you didn’t like. Sound quality was lost with every copy of the tape, and after 10 or 20 years they didn’t always work. If the tape jammed in the machine and broke, it was all over. So what’s the attraction to this outmoded media? Probably the same attraction that drives the current freak-folk scene to acoustic guitar as opposed to the laptop music of the late ’90s: analog versus digital, both literal and figurative. Whether it’s purism, fundamentalism, nostalgia, regression, or simply a part of this decade’s ’80s revival depends on your point of view.
The truth is that analog versus digital is a long-standing controversy among musicians and audiophiles. People say that vinyl and cassettes sound warm, whereas CDs sound brittle and cold. Fans of rock and jazz worry that the clarity of digital sound, which allows so many details hidden in analog recordings to surface, also extinguishes the mystique inherent in the listening experience, but for some music—classical, for example—the digital “upgrade” is like cleaning and restoring an old painting or creating a new print of an old film. CDs in fact have revealed the sterility, artificiality, and stilted fantasy of the recording studio by removing the haze of analog sound.
There is one performer who uses cassettes to occupy a simultaneously pre- and postdigital space that is charged with both mystery and reality. Aki Onda gives new meaning to the term “recording artist,” by carrying a recording Walkman with him during his travels since 1988 and collecting aural snapshots on cassette. After working as a producer in Tokyo throughout the ’90s, about five years ago he began performing using these cassettes, looping, layering, and processing them live. Calling this series “Cassette Memories,” he has issued two CDs of them, Ancient and Modern (Phonomena) and Bon Voyage! (Improvised Music from
Japan), as well as doing concerts of them that can last several hours. He considers the pieces to be a kind of audio diary, and they compare favorably to Jonas Mekas’s diary films and Robert Frank’s Lines of My Hand, especially in emphasizing the granularity of cassette sound, as well as to Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (in which the protagonist listens to various situations recorded throughout his life).Onda lets some of his documentary sounds remain recognizable while others mutate; he makes extensive use of the screeching sound made by a tape player when the “play” and “fast forward” buttons are pressed at the same time, and also uses it to achieve a ping-ponging effect between the recorded sounds, creating a sense of journey rather than mere juxtaposition, much like Michael Snow does in the globally spanning lateral movement shots in the last half of his 1981 film Presents. Onda’s production skills serve him well, as he builds up each piece sound by sound much the way a hit pop song would be constructed but keeps the immediacy of the original, quotidian sound sources by retaining the nonstudio recording quality, undiminished by the transfer to CD.
Besides Onda’s example of using the low-fidelity of cassette tape as an aesthetic tool, much like Duck’s manipulation of a turntable’s and vinyl LP’s technical shortcomings, the practice of releasing cassettes continues and remains vital among the noise crowd. Despite its being even more cost-efficient to duplicate CDRs, the musicians who run labels like Hanson, American Tapes, Fag Tapes, Heavy Tapes, and Fuck It Tapes grew up listening to noise releases on cassette and still love the tactile homemade packaging of the format (which also provides an outlet for their drawings and collages). With editions numbering in the 10s, noise cassettes have the feel of an artist’s multiple even more than private-press LPs (which generally number at least 100 to 200). In New York, Heavy Tapes’ Michael Bernstein has co-curated a show called “Leaderless: Underground Cassette Culture Now” at the artists’-book store Printed Matter (on view May 12-26), which displays hundreds of them.
“My cassettes are fun!” read the word balloon attached to a photo of experimental guitarist Eugene Chadbourne in a 1986 ad for his self-released cassettes, which numbered in the dozens. He’s reissuing them, slowly, on CD, but let’s face it: CDs are no fun. A compact disc is nothing more than a little plastic replica of an LP, like a color Xerox of a photo of the Mona Lisa. But the cassette (originally called a “compact cassette”) is its own entity, not merely a miniature reel-to-reel tape. In that regard, they’re irreplaceable.
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6 September 1997 | Billboard Magazine (p. 8)
Writing off the cassette: A big mistake
We are missing an opportunity to sell additional albums to a segment of consumers who are frustrated that they can’t find tapes.
The Museum of Portable Sound 