So now it is cassettes that are making a comeback?!?

[RABid]

When Elektron released their 25th Anniversary editions of the Digitakt, Digitone and Syntakt one of the box candy items was a cassette of songs done on those devices. I've seen more than one YouTube content provider mention release of their music on cassette. At the Consumer Electronics Show FiiO debuted their portable cassette player, and they were not alone.

 

So why is cassette suddenly a thing? Are young people already rebelling against vinyl and searching for the next "cool" antique? Or maybe artists are finding it easier to release small batches on cassette rather than waiting months for a pressing of albums.

[nursers]

It's a fascinating question, particularly as to why younger people are attracted. I'm assuming in their case novelty to some extent? For me as an older person I see the sentimental attraction as someone who's formative years were spent with cassettes more than vinyl. That said, a good turntable and new vinyl is potentially going to be a lot nicer listening experience than a cassette through say a new Walkman equivalent...

[KenElevenShadows]

They too have been coming back for a while, although obviously not in such a big way as vinyl. There's a lot of DJs doing "casette only" nights or things like that around here, and have been doing so for about 15-20 years.

 

At the risk of being extremely repetitive, my ongoing theory for quite a few years now is that young people crave a hands-on, tactile experience. Hence, modular synthesizers, film cameras, vinyl, electro-mechanical devices, and more. They have far less of that than previous generations. This has been going on for a while, so it's not just a Gen Z thing either.  And since it's been going on for a while, it's not a fad or strictly a "hipster" thing.

[nursers]

Agreed  I don't think stuff like this is going away anytime soon...

[Notes_Norton]

“Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.” — Mimetic Theory

If the influencers can convince the public that cassettes are the newest, greatest thing that all their peers desire, most of the people will desire it.

 

Oh, you just have to have these new shoes all the stars are wearing! You need an Instant Pot, everyone else has one. Those granite kitchen counters are so last year you need to remodel to be socially accepted.  The new ____ phone is what everybody wants this year. Everybody wants a pickup truck, the bigger, the better, even if you aren't going to tote more than a week's groceries in the that 1.5 ton capacity bed.

As far as cassettes are concerned, I've only had one use for them. Record music from my LP, so I can play it in the car. Of course, those days are long gone. I no longer have to put up with the surface noise and diminished fidelity. Oh, and my car player eating one for lunch.

 

I tend to be more internally motivated than most, probably because I completely quit watching the biggest mass-influencer in the early 1990s, Television. It's the salesperson in your living room.

 

Now I need to state this. “All the cool people love and intensely desire Norton Music's aftermarket styles for Band-in-a-Box, even those who don't have BiaB because without the entire collection on your hard drive, you can't impress your friends, and probably never have sexual intercourse with a beautiful person again.”

 

   

 

Insights, incites, and a bit of humor by Notes ♫

[Anderton]

1 hour ago, Notes_Norton said:

You need an Instant Pot, everyone else has one.

 

Hey! Instant Pots are awesome! Too awesome, in fact. I used the Instant Pot as an analogy for the music industry in one of my columns for Mixonline. Here's an excerpt:

 

"Let’s talk about the Instant Pot. No, not something you get at a dispensary and dissolve in your vitamin-enhanced water—but the wildly popular kitchen accessory.

 

"Modernizing the pressure cooker made the Instant Pot a huge success. It lived up to the hype of creating tasty dishes almost automatically by pressing a few buttons. During the pandemic, it flew off the shelves.

 

"But the good times didn’t last forever. Its parent company, Instant Brands, recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

 

"Why? The Instant Pot was affordable. It didn’t wear out. If you bought an Instant Pot, you’re probably still using it. However, the current corporate model demands constant growth. With the Instant Pot’s rapid success and long product life, it eventually hit a ceiling. Most people who wanted an Instant Pot had one—and didn’t need another.

 

"Several financial analysts cite market saturation and the perils of leveraged buyouts by private equity firms. Are there lessons for the music industry?"

 

After talking about those lessons in the rest of the column, the conclusion was:

 

"Maybe some MI companies are hitting an Instant Pot-like ceiling. The innovative ones will balance keeping their user base while investing in the future, but no company can afford to forget that this is a fashion industry. The smart companies are sniffing around for what people will want next, rather than trying to force something on them like multichannel surround speakers for a tiny living room in an apartment they rent for an exorbitant price."

 

[GovernorSilver]

Last cassette I remember buying was from a band named Future Shuttle.  This was after they played a gig at my friends' rented house in the early 2010s.  I liked their brand of ambient synth music enough to want to support them by buying a recording.  Unfortunately, cassette tapes were the only media on which they opted to release their music.

 

And yes, they did appear to be in the 18-25 year old age group.   I didn't get into a deep conversation or anything about the decision to release only on cassette but I've heard talk along the lines of "cassette recordings sound warmer/more analog/good-erer than digital recordings".  That in turn reminded me of my old bandmate, a 20-something year old guitarist who bought an analog delay pedal "because analog sounds warmer/more vintage/good-erer than digital delay", then learned the hard way why that analog delay was actually not a very good fit for the sounds he was looking for.

 

I think the folks who were born after the popularization of CD releases are rediscovering why older generations prefer listening to vinyl records over cassette tapes at home, hence the drop in demand for cassette releases vs. vinyl and digital.

 

I still see small venue touring acts selling their music on cassette once in a while, but most are now selling their stuff on CD, vinyl records, or simply giving out business cards or sticker with their Bandcamp links on them.  

 

Kind of related to the cassette craze which - in this area - seems to be dying out is the craze for effects pedals that mimic the sound out tape wearing out.  Peeps seem to point to Boards of Canada as inspiration for it.  I honestly never though of tape warble as the first time that came to mind the first time I heard Boards of Canada but that seems to be the thing associated with them.   The warbling tape pedal craze will outlive the cassette tape craze - too many 40+ year olds buying the things.

[David Emm]

Cassettes are just part of a necessary ecology including record cleaners, head demagnetizers and serious attention to what you recorded & when. I still have many safeties I made by recording a new album and then putting it on the shelf. They still sound amazing overall. The funny thing is how I converted many of those tapes into WAVs and MP3s.

 

I'm straddling formats from 4 different eras. You can still buy higher-grade blank cassettes, as well as numerous boom boxes. Higher-quality decks seem rare, but the format is nowhere near dead. Nakamichi long since gave up cassette decks, but TEAC still makes a few.

 

Flash drives aren't cheap enough to hand out like cassettes and you still have to decide on a main player, so you'll bounce between them to some extent. Those drives are a real boon overall, but easily labeled or handled for casual listening? Not so much. It depends on how much of a popular music consumer you are versus a focus on your own personal works. I've been living inside Logic for so long, I just pat my cassettes from time to time, like old dogs. Good boys!

[RABid]

I did a bit of research on cassette runs and mixed that little bit of knowledge with some comments here and a little bit of logic tossed in. Streaming revenues for content providers and working musicians trying to do originals is nothing. You can put digital releases up on stores like iTunes, but people like me that pay a monthly subscription to a music service is not going to buy digital releases. You can order a run of 100 cassettes for 3 dollars each and sell them for nine on your YouTube channel or at a performance you can make a little extra from people wanting to show their appreciation. Bump it up to 1000 cassettes and the price drops to $2 each. 

 

To be honest, I still occasionally buy CD's when I go to the library or another small venue and watch a live performance, if the band has CD's for sell. My car does have a CD player in it. The funny thing is the salesman kept saying "No. They don't make those anymore. You cannot get a CD player in your Camry." Well, you could 4 years ago. Don't know about now.

[Stokely]

I don't miss them in the slightest.

I get a laugh out of plugins that are there to impart cassette sound...I've seen a couple of these.  "Tape" is one thing,  those are typically emulating various analog pro tape machines,  but a freaking cassette?

[KenElevenShadows]

1 hour ago, Stokely said:

I don't miss them in the slightest.

I get a laugh out of plugins that are there to impart cassette sound...I've seen a couple of these.  "Tape" is one thing,  those are typically emulating various analog pro tape machines,  but a freaking cassette?

 

Yeah, it's a great effect for a track occasionally because it sounds so blatantly analog. We actually recorded one or two of our individual tracks through a cassette player, then played it back into the DAW for a very specific effect. It sounded great, perfect for what we were imparting.

 

Is this something that one should do all the time? Well, I certainly have no desire to do so. But it's great for this occasional kind of thing.

[KenElevenShadows]

Five Cassette Labels You Need To Know About

 

https://www.clashmusic.com/features/five-cassette-labels-you-need-to-know-about/

 

[Notes_Norton]

Most people (musicians and audiophiles excluded) don't care about sound quality, they just want to sing along with the words.

45s, cassettes, and low bitrate mp3s are prime examples of that. Streaming itself involves compression compromises.

 

14 hours ago, David Emm said:

Flash drives aren't cheap enough to hand out like cassettes

 

 Flash drive go for less than $2 on Amazon, 128MB. I suppose they are good enough to hand out, or send as a demo. 

If I were to hand out demos, I'd use the cheap flash drive. I think more people have a USB port than a cassette deck.

But there is more than one right way to do almost anything.

Notes ♫

[Notes_Norton]

22 hours ago, Anderton said:

Hey! Instant Pots are awesome!

That's not the point (and I know that you know that).

There are plenty of people with Instant Pots, Air Fryers, Veg-a-Matics, designer handbags, latest fashions, pet rocks, cabbage patch dolls, fidget spinners, furbys, and so many other items, throughout modern history, that bought them, simply because others desired them and then needed to keep up with the Jones'

Some are good, some are bad. Just fad. 

 

[Thethirdapple]

...Fad Gadget... indeed

 

Back to nature - caravan on camping sand
Back to nature - glucose filled, and programmed to respond

It's gonna rain all night
But we'll be alright
Under the geodesic dome
Infrared heater, just like home
Sitting in the shade of a rubber tree
I'll kiss you and you'll kiss me

Back to nature - burning bodies in the sun
Back to nature - just like lemmings, every one
Back to nature - capitalist aircraft fill the air
Back to nature - aerosol sun breaks on air

It's gonna rain all night
But we'll be alright
Under the geodesic dome
Infrared heater, just like home
Sitting in the shade of a rubber tree
I'll kiss you and you'll kiss me

 

Quote

Songwriters: Frank Tovey

Back to Nature lyrics © Mute Song Limited

 

 

 

PEACE

_

_

_

[Philbo King]

2 hours ago, Notes_Norton said:

Most people (musicians and audiophiles excluded) don't care about sound quality, they just want to sing along with the words.

45s, cassettes, and low bitrate mp3s are prime examples of that. Streaming itself involves compression compromises.

 

 

 Flash drive go for less than $2 on Amazon, 128MB. I suppose they are good enough to hand out, or send as a demo. 

If I were to hand out demos, I'd use the cheap flash drive. I think more people have a USB port than a cassette deck.

But there is more than one right way to do almost anything.

Notes ♫

Amazon usb drives are infamous for being mislabelled small capacity drives (like a 16 MB drive sold as a 1 GB drive). Caveat emptor...

[David Emm]

11 hours ago, Notes_Norton said:

 Flash drive go for less than $2 on Amazon, 128MB. I suppose they are good enough to hand out, or send as a demo. 
If I were to hand out demos, I'd use the cheap flash drive. I think more people have a USB port than a cassette deck.

 

Color me embarrassed!  I've been stocking up on multi-GB drives so fiercely, I lost sight of mere mb drives in the rear-view mirror. 128 mb is room enough for a decent handful of WAVs and even more MP3s. Graphics as well, to sweeten the deal. I was temporarily blinded by science. Coming up: 100 petabyte nose rings. I'll miss that one, too. 🤨

[Notes_Norton]

I remember cassettes. Cleaning the tape head, the sound of the demagnetizing tape going through, and the long, kinked, stretched tape coming out of the machine when it got hungry.

 

No thank you.

 

 

[Ivan May]

I still have a cassette player, and usually purchase them at thrift stores or at auctions. I actually have the cassette single of The Beach Boys' Kokomo, which is something I probably wouldn't want to admit to anyone who takes collecting cassettes or CDs seriously.

[ProfD]

IMO, cassettes won't be making a significant comeback any more than every other novelty item...gramophone, vinyl, 8 track tapes, electromechanical KBs, *vintage* synths, VHS/Betamax tapes, Laserdisc, Colecovision, Atari 2600, Sega Genesis, etc. 🤣

 

The future of music distribution will remain digital. QR codes will replace flash drives.

 

Personally, I've always embraced changes in technology mainly because 1) knowing the shortcomings of predecessors and 2) efficiency and consolidation of keeping a large amount of data in smaller footprint. 

 

OTOH, I look forward to digitizing my CD collection until I think about the last time I've actually pulled out a CD and listened to it.😁

 

Digitizing the CD collection will allow me to purge the physical media while maintaining the most important stuff...music as data.

 

I haven't decided if I'll even bother to digitize my vinyl and cassettes. I've got those old issues of music magazines too.

 

Yep. Whoever has a nagging need for novelty or nostalgia will quickly discover why technology marched forward.😎

[KenElevenShadows]

22 hours ago, ProfD said:

IMO, cassettes won't be making a significant comeback any more than every other novelty item...gramophone, vinyl, 8 track tapes, electromechanical KBs, *vintage* synths, VHS/Betamax tapes, Laserdisc, Colecovision, Atari 2600, Sega Genesis, etc. 🤣

 

If cassettes make as large of a comeback as vinyl, film cameras (you didn't name this, but I did), or analog synths, that would be HUGE. Those other three have had strong returns for at least 20 years now. I doubt cassettes will enjoy the large success of those other three, but if it did....wow.

 

Do you really consider all these items to be "novelty"? 

 

None of these items you've listed seem like novelties to me. They were all concerted efforts at creating a product. Some lasted, some did not, and some have had resounding comebacks.

[Notes_Norton]

14 hours ago, KenElevenShadows said:

None of these items you've listed seem like novelties to me. They were all concerted efforts at creating a product. Some lasted, some did not, and some have had resounding comebacks

IMO, cassette tapes were a successful attempt by the record industry to lower production costs and increase profits. Capitalism at work.

Same for CDs, although the product was better than the cassette, in that it at least didn't self-destruct as soon.

When audio CDs first came out, I read an article by one of the developers of the format. They sold it to the record companies because it was much cheaper to reproduce than either vinyl or cassette products. He admitted that there were, in his words, severe quantization defects which negatively affected the sound. The record companies sold this tinnier sound as CD Quality Sound, but the real reason was increased profits by lowering production costs.

The value of old things, like cassettes, is not a reflection of their quality or usefulness. Instead, it's simply perceived value. If enough people are willing to pay a high price for it, that increases its desirability to others, (mimetic theory again), who will also want to pay a high price.

There is no other reason for a cassette comeback. Lower dynamic response, extreme high frequency loss, added noise (tape hiss), head/tape path maintenance, and the occasional destruction of the media as the deck 'eats it up'.

 

People want things that other people want.

 

To illustrate:

 

Years ago I saw a documentary film. I'll summarize.

A woman bought her friend a small painting in a thrift shop as a gag gift. She thought it was the ugliest painting she had ever seen, and resembled a house painter's drop cloth.

The woman or received it got a big laugh, then one of her friends told her it might be a painting by the famous Jackson Pollock. So she took or sent it around to museum after museum, art expert after art expert, and they all agreed it was a fake because it didn't have that 'Pollock touch'. They all deemed it worthless, with zero artistic value.

That is, until someone noticed some fingerprints on the back of the canvas. They were done with the same paint, and were indeed Pollock's fingerprints. Suddenly this worthless piece of junk with zero artistic value became a masterpiece worth millions. 

The artistic value of the painting never changed, only the collectible value changed.

 

Collectible value has no direct connection with artistic, utility, or any other measurement of the object. It just means a lot of other people desire it, and since most people desire what other people desire, the laws of supply and demand go into effect. 

 

If I didn't put those Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, baseball cards in the spokes of my bicycle when I was a kid, they would be worth a lot of money today.

 

If there was a sure way to know what is going to be collectible in a few years, a lot of investors would be very, very happy.

 

Insights and incites by Notes ♫

[Stokely]

I suspect a lot of the people who yearn for things like cassettes by using plugins were not the people who grew up using them (to go off of several posts above).   That is my impression based on the apparent ages of some of the youtubers demoing them, and forumites on places like KVR     CDs caused a TON of excitement when they started really taking over, I was in school for audio engineering and you can bet we all thought "about time!"   Something that won't actually degrade each time you play it, and actually sounds "pristine" (hey it was the 80s!).  

I don't put analog synths in quite that same category, they arguably have quality that emulations don't (again, arguably).   Cassettes to my mind bring no advantages whatsoever, other than at first you could make your own while (at the time) you couldn't with cds.   Ok, they were better than 8 tracks maybe     Then again, analog synths going out of tune---as just happened to my friend who bought one for his rig--is definitely a solved problem with other keyboards (though I have had one digital synth go out of tune at a venue with dodgy power....)

"Dodgy Power" added to future band name list....

 

[harmonizer]

There was one thing cassettes had going for them over the physical CD method which replaced them: I have used both to listen to my personal music choices in my car, and cassette tapes were far superior to physical CDs for my real world usage in cars, for two reasons: (1) when you hit a pothole the cassette tape has a better chance of playback continuing unimpeded, and (2) cassette tapes are better at remaining usable after the abusive handling that is the natural result of changing media while driving a car. Inevitably the removed media (cassette or CD) ends up on a car seat or on the floor. The cassette remains usable. A CD ends up getting scratched, and becoming either totally unplayable, or totally unplayable for many of its songs. 

 

I make this comparison only for the higher quality audio and higher quality mechanics one got when purchasing a high quality blank cassette (Maxell or TDK, back in the day), and recording its audio from an LP.  The store-bought prerecorded cassettes that I purchased in the late 1970s had inferior audio and crappy mechanisms (their housings did not even have screws in them).

[Anderton]

6 hours ago, Notes_Norton said:

IMO, cassette tapes were a successful attempt by the record industry to lower production costs and increase profits. Capitalism at work.

 

Cassettes were never intended for music, but dictation. It took Dolby noise reduction to make them viable for music. 

 

Some of these "older thing fetishes" do have reasons, however bizarre. I once knew a producer who mastered to Sony Minidisc because he thought the ATRAC data compression made the sound "pop" better on the radio. Minidisc was the only format to use ATRAC, so he was kind of tied to them.

[KenElevenShadows]

Notes and others, I'm going to quote myself from this thread.

 

"At the risk of being extremely repetitive, my ongoing theory for quite a few years now is that young people crave a hands-on, tactile experience. Hence, modular synthesizers, film cameras, vinyl, electro-mechanical devices, and more. They have far less of that than previous generations. This has been going on for a while, so it's not just a Gen Z thing either.  And since it's been going on for a while, it's not a fad or strictly a "hipster" thing."

 

Also, I never said cassettes were collectible. I never said they offered a sonic advantage (they do not).

 

I did say the above, however.

 

And I still haven't seen anyone determine that cassettes or other things were "novelties".

[Stokely]

Oh no doubt.  My coworker for example, not really a musician, is fascinated by the Teenage engineering synth stuff.  I look at them and compare in my head to what I can do with software and I'm like....yeah.

But then I "came up" when software wasn't a thing.  My buddy and I as teenagers did bounce after bounce on a fostex 4-track, which sounded about like you'd imagine...but  because of those experiences, when computers did come along we took to them like a starving person at a feast.   We'd been through the desert, give us the water!   But someone growing up in front of a screen might easily crave the old-school gadgetry.    Admittedly, I have nostalgia for some of it, and I reckon it did teach some good habits about gain structure, noise (Noise?  what's that these days?) and squeezing everything you could out of whatever gear you have.    It's almost embarrassing how many synths and effects I have on drop-down menus and how many tracks I can go before a cpu/memory issue....but that doesn't necessarily make it more fun or my music better  

[Mr -G-]

Hm... I think cassettes took over from vinyl because they were way more portable (walkman anybody??) and they could be recorded easily (radio-cassette devices), car cassette players. I cannot see any advantage in going back to cassettes.

[Lou Gehrig Charles]

Our 20-something music director is always picking songs for the kid's groups, so my favorite gag line is "Hey I've got that on cassette if you need to borrow it" but he never takes the bait.  I guess the appeal hasn't trickled down that far yet!  Maybe I should say I have it on vinyl (which I don't, I was always a cassette guy).

 

But yeah, I kept all my cassettes, minus a few that got ruined, lost, or my little brother threw out the car window because he hated my taste in music.  I pretty much only  listen to them in my Fiero, because it still has a cassette player.  Yes, I have a Fiero.  I lead a strange life!

[ProfD]

21 hours ago, KenElevenShadows said:

Do you really consider all these items to be "novelty"? 

 

None of these items you've listed seem like novelties to me. They were all concerted efforts at creating a product. Some lasted, some did not, and some have had resounding comebacks.

2 hours ago, KenElevenShadows said:

And I still haven't seen anyone determine that cassettes or other things were "novelties".

Old technology as a novelty to a new generation just discovering it and/or a very niche audience. 

 

For example, new or rermastered vinyl isn't selling millions or hundreds of thousands of copies per year. 

 

Pre-recorded casette tapes may be un-mothballed from somewhere.  I do not believe companies will start manufacturing pre-recorded or blank cassettes again.

 

IMO, a handful of people which could be several hundred thousands interested in old technology doesn't make it a comeback.😎