When Taylor Swift released “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” in an array of physical formats last year, Cora Buel knew she had to get the cassette right away. Buel, a 48-year-old based in Daly City, Calif., is a fan of Swift’s music — an affinity she shares with her teenage daughter, who has since bought her mother more tapes as gifts. One main reason? Buel drives a 1998 BMW Z3, and has no other convenient options for on-the-road album playback.
“Just get an old car that only plays cassettes,” Buel said, “and you’ll listen every day.”
Although Buel might be an extreme proponent of retro design — she works as chief revenue officer at ThredUp, an online consignment store — the cassette’s return is by now almost as unmistakable as the format’s distinctive hiss and warble.
Dominant in the United States from the early 1980s until it was overtaken commercially by the compact disc in the early 1990s, the cassette tape has survived as an underground phenomenon, a deliberately anachronistic medium of choice for artists on the noise, avant-garde and low-fi fringes. But tapes began turning up at the trend-chasing retailer Urban Outfitters as long ago as 2015, the same year that digital streaming first overtook download sales. Nearly a decade later, Swift’s latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” stands as the top-selling cassette of the year so far, with about 23,000 copies sold through June 30, according to the tracking service Luminate.
Sure, cassette sales of Swift’s new album pale beside its performance in even other physical formats, where it boasts sales of 1.1 million copies on CD and another 988,000 on vinyl. But “Tortured Poets” alone is on pace to beat the total annual sales of all albums on cassette for as recently as 2009, when the Luminate precursor Nielsen SoundScan reported a mere 34,000 units shipped. If Spotify killed the iTunes star, and vinyl is increasingly a high-priced luxury item — never mind CDs for the moment — then cassettes could be the cockroaches that outlive them all.
As labels look to capitalize on “superfans” who will buy multiple formats, artists releasing new music on cassette this year cross genres and generations. A sampling of musicians embracing the format includes: the pop polymath Charli XCX, the alternative-rock titan Kim Deal, the adventurous South Florida rapper Denzel Curry, the outré Thom Yorke band the Smile, the black-metal group Darkthrone, the pop-rock duo Twenty One Pilots, the meditative electronic producer Tycho, the masked country singer Orville Peck, the folk-pop troubadour Shawn Mendes, the reigning pop wunderkind Billie Eilish, the garage-rocker Ty Segall, the alt-pop eclecticist Remi Wolf and the sultry singer-songwriter Omar Apollo.
Though the last new car to be factory-equipped with a cassette deck was reportedly a 2010 Lexus, more than a quarter of light-duty vehicles on the road are at least 15 years old, according to a recent analysis by S&P Global Mobility. Susanna Thomson of the Oakland, Calif., band Sour Widows still listens to cassettes in her 1998 Volvo wagon, which has a tape deck and a CD player. “I-90,” a song on the alternative-rock group’s bittersweet new album, “Revival of a Friend,” includes lyrics about driving down the interstate while singing along repeatedly to a beloved cassette; the tape in question was by the Southern California punk-rock outfit Joyce Manor.
“I have a little cassette library in my car that just stays there, and I’ll rotate tapes out,” she said.
At 29, Thomson presumably grew up after the cassette’s heyday, but she said that listening to tapes was partly grounded in nostalgia for her. There’s an element of protest, too. “Being passionate about cassettes, vinyl, CDs,” Thomson said, can be “an act of resistance against the powers-that-be that have their horrible fingers in the world of art.” While Thomson also has a Sony Walkman-style portable cassette player, it has a broken part, she said, and she doesn’t know how to fix it.
To cassette listeners without access to automobiles of a certain age (and their tape decks), Thomson’s tale of a busted Walkman might have a familiar ring. The best-known audio equipment manufacturers of the cassette era have long since exited the market.
Sony sold more than 200 million Walkmans from July 1979, when the devices debuted in Japan, until the music stopped around 2010. Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba and Bose no longer sell audio tape players, representatives for each of the four companies confirmed. The Consumer Technology Association, a trade group, stopped tracking sales of combination radio/cassette/CD players in 2016, when there were an estimated 653,671 units shipped, compared with a likely peak of around 25 million radio/cassette combos in 1994, according to a spokesperson.
Although the market for new cassette players became too small to bother measuring, a vast supply of the ostensibly obsolete gadgets was already in existence, in various states of repair, waiting to be rediscovered.
Liam Dwyer, the 20-year-old general director of WXBC, the student-run radio station at Bard College, originally got into tapes because an older Volkswagen that belonged to Dwyer’s father had a cassette deck in it. While there’s a tape deck at the station, Dwyer (who uses they/them pronouns) recently found a cassette player at school that someone was giving away — a Technics, model unknown. “I haven’t tested it yet, but I believe that it will work, or I will fix it up,” they said.
Dwyer has been looking into acquiring a Walkman for portable use, partly because of an interest in how artists like Liz Harris, a.k.a. Grouper, incorporate tapes into sound art and instrumental music. The first tapes Dwyer picked up were by Golden Boy, a “breakcore” artist from their own hometown, Portland, Ore., and the music that Dwyer listens to on cassette is mainly electronic and experimental. A double cassette from the Frank Ocean associate Vegyn was a staple in the Volkswagen, but “the car, unfortunately, had to be towed.”
If cassettes are popular, it’s in part because they are cheap for do-it-yourself artists and independent labels to get made. For one recent title on Jack White’s Third Man Records, cassettes cost $2.80 apiece to produce versus $6.92 per vinyl LP, Ben Blackwell, one of the label’s founders, said. Tape enthusiasts’ preferences in playback devices can be similarly economical.
Indeed, the main reason people buy used physical media, including cassettes, is to “get a bunch of stuff for a low price and then engage with it,” said Mike Hunchback, a co-owner of Brooklyn Record Exchange. He noted that his customers tend to seek out used cassette players at thrift shops, at record stores like his or online. “The majority of people that are listening to cassettes now that I sell to, they are using a cassette player that is at least 20 years old,” Hunchback said. “And the function of that cassette player is to listen to cassettes for fun.”
He emphasized that enjoying old music need not require large amounts of disposable wealth, and he contended that “the overwhelming majority” of working cassette players from 25 years ago — including unopened devices that purportedly can still be found collecting dust behind the counters of the city’s delis and bodegas — will meet listeners’ needs. “The joy of it is to actually listen to it,” he stressed.
That said, some who listen to vintage cassettes may also understandably have an appreciation for vintage audio gear. Johannes Stoeber, the general manager at Rutgers University’s student-run radio station, WRSU, collects audio equipment, mainly for analog forms of playback, and he listens to cassettes on a recorder and playback machine from Nakamachi, a high-end Japanese company. A former musician in a symphony orchestra, Stoeber, 20, tries to emulate that experience of being “enveloped by the music” in his home listening. “I listen to cassettes and other physical forms of media mostly as a way to have more of an interaction with the music,” he said.
Stoeber favors reel-to-reel or vinyl for classical music listening, but argues that rock from the 1960s and ’70s goes well on cassette, and so does pop. While he’s drawn to the tactile nature of working with tapes, as well as their versatility, Stoeber also contended that cassettes, including high-performing Type 2 and Type 4 tapes, can have a sonic character that’s preferable to other formats, analogue media types among them. “Digital music is flat,” Stoeber said. “Often vinyl can feel that way too, because it doesn’t have the occasional bit of wow and flutter that introduces a little life into it.”
Some new manufacturers have entered the cassette market, meeting a simmering demand but confronting a vastly different supply-side landscape than in the 1990s. FiiO, an electronics company with headquarters in Guangzhou, China, recently debuted a bare-bones, Walkman-style cassette player that sells for about $100. “The biggest challenge has been the near-complete disruption of the cassette player supply chain,” the company’s chief executive, James Chung, said in an emailed statement. “Restoring the technical prowess of 1990s Walkman devices is virtually impossible today.” Then again, vinyl record production has largely overcome a similar supply squeeze in the past decade.
A Paris-based startup called We Are Rewind introduced its own minimalist, Walkman-like tape player via Kickstarter in 2020, citing inspiration from the timeworn cassette deck at the heart of the “Guardians of the Galaxy” film franchise, as well as from the 1980s-retro Netflix smash series “Stranger Things.” Retailing for about $160 and up, We Are Rewind’s portable tape machines also offer Bluetooth connectivity for wireless listening.
While the company’s chief executive, Romain Boudruche, acknowledged an initial struggle to find suppliers, he said We Are Rewind sold almost 20,000 cassette players last year and hopes to double that number in 2024. He outlined plans for a smaller version and a boombox, plus collaborations with artists and brands. “The possibilities are really big, even if it’s a still a niche,” Boudruche said.
The North Carolina rapper Rapsody, who made her cassette debut earlier this year with a limited-edition tape of her new album, “Please Don’t Cry,” grew up listening to the format, but she first encountered its rebirth a couple of years ago: Her fellow Kendrick Lamar collaborator, Ab-Soul, sent her a package with a cassette of his 2022 album “Herbert” and, as it happens, a We Are Rewind player. Although Rapsody’s tape has sold out twice, she was surprised at first to find out that her fans were listening to it. “I thought it was a collector’s item,” she explained. “But people really want the experience.”
That’s not to say that all cassettes sold these days are actually being played. “As with vinyl, most aren’t really worried about that,” Carl Mello, brand engagement director for Newbury Comics, wrote in an email. Mello noted, however, that Newbury Comics, a music and collectibles chain based in the Northeast, has been selling 30 units a month of a “cheapy” Walkman-style portable tape player by Jensen, “more than we sell of any individual turntable model.”
The Haitian American rapper Mach-Hommy offers a nuanced perspective on cassettes. He has released oodles of them — including this year’s “Richaxxhaitian” — and some of his tapes are listed for thousands of dollars on the resale website Discogs (which, by the way, has about 87,000 active listenings for cassettes released since 2020). But he is also a longtime listener, with his own hand-me-down dual-well cassette deck and vivid memories of perhaps ill-advisedly taping over one of his father’s cassettes as a child. He has a Walkman, he said, but he doesn’t use it much.
While Mach-Hommy said he’s flattered by the resale values, he expressed ambivalence about what people do with the music on his tapes, whether that’s push play or try to flip for profit. “I made it to listen to,” he said. “But I’ve heard accounts of people being able to take some of these pieces, resell them, and open a business or buy a car, or steer themselves out of homelessness and destitution.” In the end, he added, “it’s up to you.”
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