Cassette tapes see surprising sales surge

[Mindy]

CBS Mornings
May 3, 2025

Forget 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.

[Mindy]

@tristan_geoff

thought of you when I saw this fren

[tristan_geoff]

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!!!

[Trollheart]

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.

[Lexi of the Dawn]

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.

[tristan_geoff]

haters gonna hate

[Mindy]

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

[tristan_geoff]

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

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

[Trollheart]

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.

[tristan_geoff]

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

[tristan_geoff]

IMG_8039 by
[url=https://flic.kr/p/2r2xutz]IMG_8038 by
[url=https://flic.kr/p/2r2w8v2]IMG_8037 by

[Mindy]

[Lexi of the Dawn]

I was confused at first glance and wondered if you backed MB up on one of those data cassettes. 

[tristan_geoff]

I was confused at first glance and wondered if you backed MB up on one of those data cassettes. 

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/

[Trollheart]

That's some stellar work from both of you!