After vinyl revival ... music fans rewind to the age of the cassette
THE sound was awful, the flimsy tape invariably got mangled in the machine and you could never find your favourite track.
But 30 years after audio cassettes were pushed aside by CDs, the format is back in fashion – and sales are booming.
Surprisingly, the revival is being driven not by nostalgic babyboomers but by hipsters who have grown up with digital music streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music.
The British Phonographic Indust ry predicts t hat more t han 100,000 cassettes will be sold this year – double the number shifted last year.
Following the vinyl revival of the past few years, hip young bands are also now also releasing albums and EPs on cassette, partly because it is cheap and partly because it has simply become cool again.
The physical nature of cassettes, and the fact they can be shown off on Instagram in a way that digital music cannot, has also played a significant part in their resurgence.
Young bands trying to build up an audience are leading the crusade, although major stars such as Robbie Williams and Ariana Grande are also joining in.
Tallulah Webb, 22, founder of London- based cassette- only l abel Sad Club Records, said tapes gave embryonic bands freedom in a way other formats could not.
‘If your first release is a seven-inch vinyl, you’re not going to make any money on it – and could well lose out if you don’t sell out your 500 run. But with cassettes, I can produce a minimum run of 20, which is so much cheaper.’ Ms Webb added that bands often sold tapes at gigs as a memento, with the advantage that it was ‘easier to put a cassette in your bag than a seven-inch record’.
But economics and practicality were only part of the story, she said. The problems that helped consign cassettes to seeming oblivion – their limited capacity compared with digital music and the difficulty in switching from track to track – also made them a great way of focusing on a whole album, something younger people were beginning to appreciate.
‘If I’m listening to Spotify, I might listen to five seconds of a song, decide I don’t like it and skip it,’ Ms Webb said. There was also the temptation when listening to an album digitally to pick the best tracks, ‘whereas what
I love about cassettes is that you can’t skip any of it – you have to listen to it all the way through. So whenever I put a cassette in my player, it makes me sit down and listen to it, rather than just having it on in the background.’
Tesco sells a basic portable cassette player for £17 – up from £15 in August, suggesting that demand is rising.
Meanwhile, classic Sony Walkman devices from the early 1980s are fetching an astonishing £ 1,000 on online auction site eBay.
But although the cassette revival is real, the predicted 100,000 sales this year are only a tiny fraction of the 83 million bought in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and Phil Collins topped the charts.