“She may be young but she only likes old things, and modern music it ain’t to her taste”— Death Cab for Cutie, “Monday Morning”
— Death Cab for Cutie, “Monday Morning”
In record-collecting circles, we often joke about what we call “Ebay Prices”: people on Ebay who’ve vaguely heard that “vinyl is back in fashion”, and list their tatty old copy of Thriller for hundreds of dollars. More recently, I spotted a listing of a box of blank cassettes for $250.
Seriously?
On consultation, the consensus of my record-collecting peers was, in the immortal words of Dale Kerrigan: Tell ‘im ‘e’s dreamin’! Cassettes are collectable again, said one — but not that much.
A retro-fashion for cassettes is not exactly new: for some years, hipster indie bands issued limited runs of cassettes, while a die-hard community of collectors and mixtape enthusiasts kept the faith. The Guardians of the Galaxy movies also made mixtapes hip again. But it’s only recently that the format has really exploded in popularity.
Sales of the retro recordings have skyrocketed over the past few years. Since 2017, the number of cassette tapes sold in the U.S. has been increasing by double-digit percentages every year (33 percent from 2019 to 2020). In the UK, sales increased 103 percent in just the first half of 2020, according to the Official Charts Company, which called the cassette “the unlikely comeback kid of music formats.”
Of course, double bugger-all is still bugger-all. The decline of all physical formats from the early 2000s — when digital downloads hit — has been catastrophic. Video Killed the Radio Star, CD killed vinyl and cassette, and the MP3 dealt a near-death blow to them all. So, when vinyl enthusiasts crow that records are outselling CDs for the first time since the 90s, what they’re ignoring is that both are coming off a very low base. (And at the same time, I’m finding the same kind of bargains in second-hand CDs as I did with vinyl in the 90s, while prices of the latter even in op shops is going through the roof.)
Still, there’s no denying the sudden enthusiasm for cassettes (and I’m cursing myself for ditching what might now be a fortune in old TDKs, when I moved to Tasmania).
Claims that digital sound is inferior to analog is purist bullshit, of course. While the sound of cheap MP3s and streaming services suffers from over-compression, there are widely-used lossless formats, like FLAC, which preserve every band of frequency, far beyond human possibility. Thankfully, too, the “Loudness Wars” of the early 2000s, when producers smashed the dynamic range of recordings all into the red, to maximise the sound on cheap earbuds, are long past us.
But there’s no denying the pure, tactile joy of putting on a record or cassette, or even a CD. Not to mention that, as Neil Young said when trying to tout his failed Pono music player, people are sick of “buying air”. A hard disk drive full of files just doesn’t give the same satisfaction as shelves stacked with records, tapes and CDs.
Artists are also rediscovering cassettes for the same reason that they revolutionised the independent music scene in the 80s.
Cassettes can be produced in small quantities—sometimes as low as 50 tapes in a run—and cost about $2.50 per tape. CDs require a high minimum run, and vinyl is prohibitively expensive for many smaller artists.
Smithsonian Mag
For the underground music scene in the 1980s, especially hardcore punk, cassettes were God. (Literally, in the case of Australian band God, who took their name from an early rehearsal tape the teenage band members dubbed, “the God tape”.) Their cheapness and ease meant that bands scraping by on the dole could make and sell tapes for next to nothing. Just bung a boom box in the corner, run through their set, and done. With double-cassette decks making dubbing off copies a cinch, bands were able to run off a dozen or a hundred cassettes, with photocopied covers, for peanuts. Today, some such cassettes are worth hundreds of dollars to collectors.
Cassettes were a godsend to fans, too. Bootleg tapes of live recordings proliferated: I still have dozens of them, with their distinctive photocopied covers on white, blue, yellow or red paper. At the same time, bands, managers, writers, and fans, were swapping, copying and compiling cassette compilations which were often mailed around the world, creating a parallel music economy at a time when independent artists were completely locked out by the major labels.
Then there’s the mixtape. In Guardians of the Galaxy a mixtape is Peter “Star-Lord” Quill’s last remaining connection to his mother and to Earth itself. In High Fidelity, Nick Hornby lauds the mixtape’s role as combination billet-doux and serenade. Making a mixtape was a far more serious business than cobbling together a playlist on your computer: not only did you have to physically have an original to hand, the sheer time and effort involved made compiling a mixtape a true labour of love.
In fact, besides my extension collection of demos, live tapes, and officially-released cassettes, I have kept a small collection of mixtapes and home recordings that each have a special place in my heart. There’s the tape of Lloyd Cole and the Commotions’ Rattlesnakes that a now-deceased best friend gave me. My “dole tape”, the cassette with the Smiths’ Meat is Murder and Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love, which I listened to on my knockoff walkman on the fortnightly bus trip and long walk to the dole office in the mid-80s. There’s also the collection of mixtapes I compiled by setting my VCR to record a few hours of Rage on a Saturday night, so I could spend Sunday dubbing down the stuff I liked.
The only digital music file I have with anywhere near that sort of provenance is an MP3 of the JAMs’ (later known as KLF) first, confiscated album, 1987 (What the Fuck’s Going On?) which was recorded from Jimmy Cauty’s personal vinyl copy.
Now, excuse me: I’m off to the op-shop. There’s a pile of pianola rolls they’re practically giving away — I’ll be ready when they come back in fashion!