Cassette tapes see surprising sales surge

[Buckeye Randy]

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.

[Psy-Fi]

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.

[Lisnaholic]

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

I went cassette and thus started a year of shoplifting cassettes.

This thread is just full of surprises !

..but on the topic of cassettes, I'm with Trollheart 100% :-

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.

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 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.  

[Buckeye Randy]

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.

[Mindy]

I used to be lil mr painter lol 

[SGR]

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.

[tristan_geoff]

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

[Lexi of the Dawn]

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.

[Key]

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.