Swift released her highly anticipated album Midnights on LP, CDs, and cassette tapes, showing that the long obsolete format can be trendy, and she’s not alone. Other artists like Linkin Park, Kate Bush, and Billie Eilish prove cassette tapes are making a comeback.
The history of the cassette tape
We live in a fast-paced modern world where everything is easily accessible on a small device that fits in your pocket. Songs today are readily available on demand, but the cassette tape seems to be slowly making its way back into the industry.
The modern cassettes were made in 1963 by the multinational conglomerate Philips. The company tasked its Belgian and Vienna divisions to come up with a design tape cartridge for narrower tape. The Vienna team developed a single-hole cassette, according to Mix Cloud, while the Belgian division came up with a two-spool cartridge which Philips picked up.
The Dutch company offered a machine to record and play the cassettes, and by 1966 the company had sold more than 250,000 recorders in the US alone. The cassette tape picked up quickly, and by the end of the decade, the business was worth over $150 million.
The early ’70s saw Philips work on improving sound quality through the 8-track tape. The compact cassette became popular in the late ’70s and became a much-preferred alternative to the 12-inch vinyl LP.
The cassette tape became a popular format for prerecorded music, working with the LP record and then moving on to the digital compact disc. Eventually, the compact disc caused the prerecorded cassettes to become obsolete by the mid- ’90s.
Nostalgia and trending artists are contributing to the cassette tape resurgence
Although Philips and Sony continued working on the cassette tapes, the sound quality was still mediocre. Few may miss the cracked cases, a poor audio quality that made it seem like a blanket had been thrown over the speaker, and, most of all, the tangled tapes.
However, the resurgence of cassette tapes is difficult to overlook. Some indie bands and artists have stuck to the cassette tape format, and now major pop artists are joining the trend, which perhaps explains why the sales of the tapes have skyrocketed in the last few years.
According to a study by entertainment data tracker Luminate, cassette tape sales doubled from 2020 to 2021, going from a mere 173,000 to a whopping 343,000, and the trend continued well into 2022, Fortune reported. While these figures are barely enough to put Spotify and other music streaming platforms out of business, they indicate a renewed interest in the obsolete format, especially among younger people.
Nostalgia’s also a huge contributing factor to the resurgence of cassette tapes. In Stranger Things, an episode with Bush’s 1985 hit “Running Up That Hill” on tape played a pivotal role and made the song a modern chart-topper. Other artists like Eilish, The Weekend, and Swift have also recently released albums on tape.
Cassette tapes are fetching high prices today
The numbers speak for themselves, but who exactly is buying all these cassette tapes? The answer is Gen-Z and Millennials. These two generations of people are buying cassette tapes as souvenirs which, much to many hardcore cassette diehards’ annoyance, jerks the prices up astronomically.
While tapes typically retail between $8 and $20, newer editions by huge-name artists rack up high prices. Dua Lipa’s limited edition tape version of Future Nostalgia can fetch up to $250 on eBay, and some collectors go to even more expensive lengths to get their hands on the tapes.
According to Rarest, Linkin Park has the most expensive and possibly rarest cassette tape. The group’s 1996 cassette tape demo from when they were called Xero sold for $4,500 in 2021.
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