Apple Music, Spotify and iTunes are all used by many people nowadays as ways to access a great deal of music online. How do cassette tapes fit into this category? They generally don’t, but tape sales have been rising over the past year.
Cassette tapes were first introduced in the early 1960s and became popular during the 1980s, even outselling records. Eventually, they started to lose their popularity in the '90s with the rise of the CD.
Now, they’ve made a comeback. In 2016 alone, cassette sales increased by 74%, according to Billboard.
“I think it could either be another hipster fad, or our generation having cars with tape players and using them for their actual purpose,” Ben Messner, a freshman studying music education, said.
Messner inherited his father’s 2003 Toyota Avalon, and the stereo had a cassette player.
“I always wanted to get tapes for it, and then I fell in love with them,” Messner said.
Messner owns about eight to 10 tapes and said whenever a store has them, he will always look through the selection to see if there are any quality tapes.
Andrew Lampela, co-owner of Haffa’s Records, has a different take on the comeback of cassettes.
“I’d much rather have a different format,” Lampela said.
Lampela grew up using cassette tapes and he said they are personally not for him. He doesn’t see many students buying cassette tapes either, but what he does see is touring bands dropping off cassette tapes at the store.
It can take roughly $10,000 to create an album in a studio — it only costs about three dollars to create a cassette tape. Thus, it’s self-explanatory why a band would see the appeal of making cassette tapes.
“It’s the cheapest way to do a physical analog release,” Chris Lute, guitarist and vocalist for the band Nightstalker said on Facebook Messenger. “We’d prefer to do vinyl, but it’s very expensive.”
Cassette tapes are cheap on the consumer side as well. Tapes are generally sold for only $3-7 as opposed to $10-20 for a CD. Also, they are considered retro collectibles.
“A lot of times people will buy your tape just because it’s a tape and they collect tapes,” Lute said.
Whether it’s a “hipster fad” or just a cheap way to create and distribute music, cassette tapes are making their way out of the '80s and into 2017.
“There’s a certain tone that tapes and tape machines have that’s very vintage, and when the sound engineer mixes it perfectly it can turn the album from a collection of songs into something similar to a symphony with multiple movements,” Messner said.
