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.
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 [email protected]” 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