QuoteCBS Mornings
May 3, 2025
QuoteForget the vinyl revolution: For old-school music fans, cassettes are making a comeback. Superstars are offering some of their latest songs on the fragile, finicky devices, and there's a surprising surge in cassette sales. Here's why some fans are looking to the past to see the future of music.
@tristan_geoff thought of you when I saw this fren
wow!! the preservation part is super interesting :0
I'd love to learn more about the inner workings of the decks and tapes, I think that's a super good skill to know
it's been cool seeing tapes come back up, I've had my label since 2018 now and it's grown a lot and seen so many different eras and periods of my life, I've released over 60 now!!!
Not for me, thanks. As someone who grew up in the age of cassettes, I only ever used them because there was no alternative. If you wanted to record an album, you had to put it on tape, especially if you wanted to listen to music on the move. Now you can do this many ways, and I would never go back to tapes. They had shitty sound, they got stuck half the time, wrecked your tape deck and/or walkman when they go tangled in the spindles, you had to swap the tape around to listen to the second side. Nah. And Walkmans generally didn't give great sound, though these days maybe they've improved them vastly.
But tapes were used in my day for three things: making compilations, recording an album someone had lent you or recording it to listen to it on the move. No longer necessary, and I would never go back to them. I can't see the attraction personally. I bet they kick up the prices of both tapes and decks/walkmans now.
Boo to cassettes! They're a relic of a bygone age and I do not miss them.
As someone who caught the tail end of the cassette era, I 100% concur with TH. Though I did like that they felt more durable and easy to handle and remove from the case than CDs, which always felt like they were going to bend or get fingerprinted and it made me feel like I had to take way more time and care to use them since they weren't cheap back then.
haters gonna hate
I'm the same age as Lexi, so tapes were a thing for me in the 90s but once I got to middle school and CDs were out, I was not still using tapes.
I then got a 2nd wave for tapes hype about 10 years ago, bought a bunch of eBay.
I was a wild mp3 collector for years but then once I hit the Streaming wave, I never looked back and deleted my whole very organized 75k mp3 collection lol
Quote from: Mindy on May 03, 2025, 10:10 PMI'm the same age as Lexi, so tapes were a thing for me in the 90s but once I got to middle school and CDs were out, I was not still using tapes.
I then got a 2nd wave for tapes hype about 10 years ago, bought a bunch of eBay.
I was a wild mp3 collector for years but then once I hit the Streaming wave, I never looked back and deleted my whole very organized 75k mp3 collection lol
noooo :'( that's a travesty.
I've lately got back into building my mp3 collection back up and using a 2014(or so?) iPod nano to listen to my collection, i think it helps focus on the music and whats in the system at a given point, and to treat music as less disposable/algorythmic. personally i hated spotify after a while, especially given how much I used to pay into it to get my music up, thousands of streams and I only made like 7 bucks!! fuck spotify they're killing music
Well I wouldn't have deleted anything. I still have my LP collection even though I don't play them, and I have all my CDs. I just think that for the time, cassettes were a way - the only way - to record music and they were okay for that. But as a medium they really suck. Leave one near a speaker and it will develop "dropouts" (if you don't know what that is, and it's nothing to do with Kanye, imagine someone hitting you on the back as you sing, or imagine someone constantly tuning a radio off and back to the station) and the more you recorded over songs the worse the quality got.
Cassettes fulfilled only one function in the 1970s and 1980s, and once that function was taken over by better media, there was and is no need for them. If people want to go all nostalgic for them, they're of course free to do so, but I can't for the life of me ever see anyone from my era saying "Oh I really miss cassettes." We don't, and we never will. They had their day, they did the job they were built to (barely) and now they're not needed in our world.
i kind of love the fickleness and the impermanence of the format, I feel that it's part of the appeal! I love that the music is tangible in a cute little case and works by tape magic unbeknownst to mortal.....
I love the act of rewinding, fast forwarding, taping, having to put the tape over the tabs if they're tab out cassettes, listening back and hearing the quality of the music change when put to that format and how different the sounds can be :) trial and error is huge with cassettes and I love the possibilities in the format! tape loops, being able to change the magnetic qualities idk uhh i wanna look into the more experimental ways of playing with them in order to make sounds that way they are so fun idk!!
I also love VHS similarly and have quite a collection
Next post: my collection ;)
(https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54493945912_bbc889833e_k.jpg) (https://flic.kr/p/2r2rHzA)IMG_8039 (https://flic.kr/p/2r2rHzA) by
[url=https://flic.kr/p/2r2xutz](https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54495072503_59e9d4369b_k.jpg) (https://www.flickr.com/photos/200102826@N04/)IMG_8038 (https://flic.kr/p/2r2xutz) by
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Quote from: tristan_geoff on May 04, 2025, 04:27 AM(https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54493945912_bbc889833e_k.jpg) (https://flic.kr/p/2r2rHzA)
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I was confused at first glance and wondered if you backed MB up on one of those data cassettes. :laughing:
Quote from: Lexi Darling on May 04, 2025, 05:59 AMI was confused at first glance and wondered if you backed MB up on one of those data cassettes. :laughing:
LMAO no I put out this tape, Forum Member Showcase, early 2022.
@Mindy did that picture thats on the cover
better view -> https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/mucha-na-dziko-jesus-the-carpenter-daydream-society-no-curfew-kids/forum-member-showcase/
That's some stellar work from both of you! :thumb:
My dilemma in 1978 was music in my first car. Should I get an AM/FM 8-track player to support my existing 8-track collection that I had with my bedroom stereo...or...get an AM/FM cassette player since the quality was better than 8-track and was obviously the wave of the future.
I went cassette and thus started a year of shoplifting cassettes.
I wouldn't buy a cassette tape now but I still have some cassettes in my music collection. Maybe 100 or so. Some official releases and some homemade recordings. Haven't played any of them in years. Still have a stereo boombox with a working cassette player if I ever feel nostalgic enough to play one.
Quote from: Mindy on May 03, 2025, 10:10 PMI was a wild mp3 collector for years but then once I hit the Streaming wave, I never looked back and deleted my whole very organized 75k mp3 collection lol
Quote from: tristan_geoff on May 04, 2025, 04:27 AM(https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54493945912_bbc889833e_k.jpg) (https://flic.kr/p/2r2rHzA)
Quote from: Buckeye Randy on May 04, 2025, 03:11 PMI went cassette and thus started a year of shoplifting cassettes.
This thread is just full of surprises ! :thumb:
..but on the topic of cassettes, I'm with Trollheart 100% :-
Quote from: Trollheart on May 03, 2025, 11:15 PMCassettes fulfilled only one function in the 1970s and 1980s, and once that function was taken over by better media, there was and is no need for them. If people want to go all nostalgic for them, they're of course free to do so, but I can't for the life of me ever see anyone from my era saying "Oh I really miss cassettes." We don't, and we never will. They had their day, they did the job they were built to (barely) and now they're not needed in our world.
In addition to really poor sound quality, no-one has yet mentioned the inconvenience of locating that one track you wanted to hear in the middle of the tape, and all the
stop/fastforward/play/stop/rewind that you had to do to get there. That's one reason I most often bought what in the UK were called C60s, being 30 mins each side. The C90s were theoretically best for getting two albums on one cassette, but they were pretty fragile in my experience.
Thanks, tristan, for reminding me of that detail about taping over the protective tab holes :laughing: Another detail I remember: choosing the pricier chrome dioxide tapes to record onto, and obsessively cleaning the tape heads of my deck, hoping that the music would finally shine out from the muffled mediocrity that tape technology was reducing so much of my music to. I do not wish those days back at all.
My weekend ritual of listening to music by the fire pit was supported for years with boomboxes. I did this first with cassettes played on boomboxes that had no CD player and later with boomboxes that could play both cassettes and CDs. Attrition to old electronics combined with advances in technology is part of life. In the blink of an eye, I'm listening to Spotify from my phone through a portable speaker and I did this happily for years.
Call me nostalgic or reminiscent or just a hopeless romantic but I began to yearn for the days of a boombox. I did some quick checks at stores and even at Goodwill for something that would serve the purpose, but nothing checked all the boxes. I mentioned my fruitless search to Mrs. Buckeye and didn't give it much more thought as cool autumn evenings gave way to the chill of winter.
A couple months later, Santa delivered a gift for the ages. It is the most ridiculous boombox ever made and I love it. It's huge; it has AM/FM plus sort of weather band, it can play CDs, it can play and record cassettes plus it has Bluetooth. There's more, the speakers have lights that pulse to the music and it can be powered by batteries, you can plug it in or you can charge it for hours of outdoor fun.
The bottom line, I listened to some cassettes I hadn't heard for years. I listened to a few CDRs that I hadn't heard for years. My yearn for nostalgia fulfilled.
Now, I use this 20lb monstrosity as the world's heaviest portable speaker with Spotify from my phone. That's progress for you.
Quote from: tristan_geoff on May 04, 2025, 04:27 AM(https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54493945912_bbc889833e_k.jpg) (https://flic.kr/p/2r2rHzA)
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I used to be lil mr painter lol :laughing:
Yeah, the aesthetics of tapes are cool, but in agreement with some others - beyond the aesthetics, they kinda suck. My parents had a lot of them that I dealt with as a kid to listen to music, but thankfully, CDs were much more prevalent by the time I was growing up.
at the end of the day, whatever physical medium you use, hell even mp3s, for sure beat the streaming era. the impermanence and devaluing of art is the bane of my modern existence i hope spotify goes bankrupt
I use Youtube for all my music streaming; my main problem with Spotify was that a lot of stuff I liked just wasn't on there, and things that were on there would randomly get taken off due to label issues, or they'd have an album but only in a remaster I don't enjoy as much, or other issues. Youtube remedies that by letting me listen with the official streaming uploads and augment that with user uploads of rare albums and versions of tracks, etc. And if you really want a local file in the interest of preservation etc, there are pretty good converters out there on the seven seas, though probably not audiophile quality I'd imagine.
All this Spotify hate lol, I use Spotify literally every day and have never had an issue with it. But I also have a pretty extensive vinyl collection so really, Spotify is just far more convenient for music listening purposes. It's basically part of my before work and after work ritual. Dunno what I'd do without it tbh. And I definitely spent many years using a CD player and having to fit it into my pants pocket and hope to god it didn't skip all the time. We've definitely evolved a bunch.