8 years ago
1
Forget vinyl, cassette tapes are the hippest new format from the past
Vinyl records aren’t the only analog music media undergoing a revival in the modern era. A company that specializes in another nostalgic format — cassette tapes — just had its best year ever. Springfield, Missouri-based National Audio Company (NAC), which opened in 1969, produced 10 million tapes last year according to a Bloomberg. report. The company noted that cassette sales are up 20 percent year-over-year...
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IMO, this is nostalgia superseding common sense - or a "retro" movement being driven entirely by people born in the CD/digital age. Playing around with and experiencing old gear and gadgets is fun - I do it all the time - but let's not forget that cassette tapes, as music media, were objectively awful. Back in the day the only advantages they had were that they were more portable than LPs and you could record/make mixes on them. But today there are numerous ways do those things more cheaply, much more easily, more quickly, and with far less likelihood of wrecking the device involved. Cassette audio quality was poor when you bought them and degraded over time, they were fragile, they had an absurd number of moving parts (any one of which could break and screw up your music), and they were prone to getting ruined in all sorts of ways. The only thing that might be said for them as a media for art is they encouraged people to listen to all of an artist's album (and maybe encouraged artists to make albums with more than one or two decent songs) because skipping songs was such a pain in the ass. /rant
Yeah. I'm getting old.