FEATURE:
Those Who Are Cool, Spool
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Nostalgia, Rarity or a Reaction Against the Digital: What’s Behind the Revival of the Cassette?
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EARLIER in the week…
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a report came out – which I shall quote in a minute – that showed cassettes sales are increasing. I looked at various music sites’ social media pages, and they asked people whether they listen to cassettes now and have boomboxes/tape players. Many have cassettes still but, of those people asked, not too many played theirs. Maybe it is an age thing, but I fondly remember cassettes when I was discovering music in the late-1980s and 1990s, and I have a few hanging around. I will talk about that more, but the ‘revival’ of cassettes is not a new thing. Last year, The Guardian reported the comeback:
“Pause. Stop. Rewind! The cassette, long consigned to the bargain bin of musical history, is staging a humble comeback. Sales have soared in the last year – up 125% in 2018 on the year before – amounting to more than 50,000 cassette albums bought in the UK, the highest volume in 15 years.
It’s quite a fall from the format’s peak in 1989 when 83 million cassettes were bought by British music fans, but when everyone from pop superstar Ariana Grande to punk duo Sleaford Mods are taking to tape, a mini revival seems afoot. But why?
“It’s the tangibility of having this collectible format and a way to play music that isn’t just a stream or download,” says techno DJ Phin, who has just released her first EP on cassette as label boss of Theory of Yesterday”.
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Although the growth of cassette sales cannot hit the heights of vinyl, it seems that many people are embracing the cassette in 2020. In this NME article, we can see that the decades-lasting music format still has a place in the modern world:
“New figures from the Official Charts company have revealed that cassette sales have more than doubled in 2020.
Describing the cassette as “the unlikely comeback kid of music formats”, the Official Charts Company said there was a 103% increase on cassette sales in the first half of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019.
65,000 cassettes were purchased in the first half of 2020 and the figures are on course to top 100,000 for the first time since 2003.
The best selling cassettes of 2020 were largely in the pop genre, with 5 Seconds of Summer, Lady Gaga, The 1975, Selena Gomez and Dua Lipa taking the top five spots.
5 Seconds of Summer’s ‘CALM’ sold 12,000 in the first week making it the fastest selling cassette in 18 years.
Last month (June 22), it was revealed that vinyl sales soared after record stores re-opened for the first time since lockdown.
According to data from the Official Charts Company, sales in the first week since re-opening reached the highs of pre-COVID-19.
Vinyl sales surged by 27.57% week-on-week to a total of 88,486 units, while CDs also experienced a rise of 11.09% to 253,779 units”.
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What are the reasons behind the continuation and rise of cassette sales?! I think, right now, there is a real drive among music fans to support new artists. I think cassettes are becoming more readily available than they used to. So many artists are releasing their albums on various different format and, more often than not, this will include a cassette option. The COVID-19 pandemic has hindered a lot of progress for artists in terms of touring and revenue, so I do feel like people are buying music to help aid artists. More than that, there is an increased feeling that streaming platforms are not compensating artists adequately, and physical sales are increasing because of that. Even though C.D.s have stalled during lockdown, vinyl sales are doing well, and people are really keen to experience music in a physical form. It is strange how cassette sales are increasing whilst compact discs are struggling a little. Many feared that streaming services would eliminate and replace physical formats, but music lovers of all ages still want the experience you cannot get with digital music. I love the fact cassettes are doing well; even if you do not own a cassette player, I think it is nice to own albums on cassette as a keepsake. Many might say that defeats the object of buying an album – and this is why I do not like people buying vinyl for that reason -, but many people will amass cassettes and, down the line, procure a suitable device on which to play them.
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Another reason why cassettes are continuing their incline in sales might be a sense of nostalgia. I do not think that people are buying albums from their childhood on cassette to get a sense of the past. I think many are buying new albums, but they want it on cassette to, maybe, get a sense of what it felt like to buy music when they were younger. Certainly, I feel people of my age (in their thirties) misses the portability of cassettes and the tangible experience where one can read the insert and have that experience of flipping the tape halfway through an album. One can definitely not claim cassettes are a perfect format. The all-too-regular experience of tapes jamming and having to remove them carefully; often using a pencil to put the spooling back in the cassette where, inevitably, you’d play it again and it wouldn’t work! The sound quality is not as great as vinyl, and it can be easy to damage cassettes because they are pretty small. In an article from last year, the Los Angeles Times explored the faults with the cassettes, in addition to explaining why they are making a comeback:
“The hissing cassette was never music lovers’ first choice. The only reason these things were popular throughout my childhood and adolescence in the 1970s and ’80s was their portability: You could play them on a boom box, in a car, on a Walkman when they appeared 40 years ago. The CD killed them off more ruthlessly than it did vinyl records: There was simply no reason to compromise so deeply on sound quality anymore.
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Many people perceive music through stories, both personal and invented, but always emotionally resonant. Sometimes the story is attached merely to a piece of music. Few people can remember what device played the song to which they first danced with their partner. Sometimes, though, the specific gadget or technology is important too.
As Goran Bolin of the Södertörn University in Stockholm wrote in 2014, people “develop specific, sometimes passionate, relationships with reproduction technologies such as the vinyl record, music cassette tape, comics and other now-dead or near-dead media forms.” The passion, as Bolin put it, “is activated by the nostalgic relationships with past media experiences, the bittersweet remembrances of media habits connected to one’s earlier life phases.” That means an attachment not just to a record but to a specific record, which hiccups in a specific place and has a specific rip on its sleeve; not just to a song but to the cassette on which it was recorded as an afterthought.
There’s also something about the tape revival that recalls the radicalism of the 1980s cassette culture: Tapes were cheap, and people used them to copy and share music from expensive records, an early form of piracy. In the Soviet Union, when I grew up, the state record company wouldn’t put out the music we listened to — so bands and underground entrepreneurs distributed them on cassettes.
“Today’s cassette culture, by eschewing contemporary media forms for more esoteric ones, is building on the older cassette-culture tradition of rejecting dominant industry formats,” audio producer Craig Eley wrote in a 2011 essay”.
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I do hope that the cassette holds firm but, as only one firm in Europe still makes cassettes, the survival of the format is precarious! Whilst you can buy a pretty cool boombox like this for not a lot of money, I think the increased portability of a Walkman is favoured by many. They cost a pretty penny, but there is this desire to strike against the emptiness of digital music and its disposability and actually spend money ensuring that we listen to music with our full attention on a format that, to be honest, is flawed. Despite its downsides, I like a cassette because you listen to the album the whole way through, and you have this immersive experience. Can the cassette boom continue through this year? Last year, the feeling was that cassettes were being bought because they were fashionable, but I think things are a little different this year with people reacting to COVID-19 by buying more physical music than they might have. More new albums are being offered on cassette, so I don’t think it is just nostalgia. Whilst the rise in cassette sales might be relative – the total figures are not huge -, and the revival might not last too long for various reasons (the scarcity of facilities that make cassettes for example), there is clearly an appetite! In spite of the limitations of the cassette market, I hope that this upward trend continues. Most artists, when they offer an album on cassette, might a limited run because of the lack of cassettes compared with compact discs, and a lot of record shops do not stock cassettes at all – and one would be hard-pushed to find too many on sites like Amazon!
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I found an interesting article from Goldmine Mag that talks about used cassettes and their boom:
“And so on, because what this all adds up to is, there is currently a very buoyant market in used cassettes, and it’s probably not going anywhere. Again, the generation that grew up spending its pocket money on cassettes feels exactly the same way about their old purchases as their older siblings do about vinyl: the thrill of opening the case for the first time, the ritual of pressing the buttons and adjusting all the switches — depending, of course, on whether your player had any: chrome, metal or normal; MPX in or out; Dolby on or off, autoplay, Megabass. This isn’t a cassette player, it’s Cape Canaveral!
Sitting on the subway into work, with Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music playing through your Walkman, while everyone else is listening to Phil Collins and Dire Straits. Compiling the ultimate 90-minute Rolling Stones collection, and then having to redo it because you forgot the song you wanted in the middle. And then accidentally taping over it because someone just loaned you the new Yes LP and, though you know that home taping is piracy, because there it says so on the inner sleeve (alongside a very smart cassette skull and crossbones cartoon), what difference will one fewer copy really make to their fortune?”.
Who would have thought that, in 2020, we’d be looking at the (relative) health of the cassette market?! It is great to see and, though the sales increase is not exactly a revolution, one cannot say that physical formats are only bought by a single demographic, as it seems buyers of all tastes and ages are buying cassettes – whether it is because of their retro value, or they like the feel and experience of putting a cassette into a player. Personally, I really love the cassette and feel that it has a future ahead of it. Now that I have been thinking about cassettes, it has got me thinking about the albums I want to buy on that form and, though it is going to be an expensive quest, I feel that the expense is…
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MORE than worth it!