CASSETTES on the COMEBACK? ... CBS story about Cassettes, sales Surging, what next, 8-Track?

[MetalSludgeCEO]

Just saw this on T.V....

I can say... that between 2005-2020, I may have sold a few (tops) Cassettes per year.

In the last year or two... I bet I have sold between 30 and 50. Not a lot... but... essentially the count went up 20 fold easily!

I have sold several, just in the last few weeks... good thing I kept those random boxes for the last 30 years! Ha!

I don't have a ton of product on cassette, but do carry 4 titles, and all are moving.

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmfaXNXPp7U

$tEvil

[daveg]

Did ya send along a free pencil with them, to re-spool the tape when it eventually gets eaten....

I had thousands of tapes at one point. Looking back, it was a terrible format. Sound was bad, small artwork, not very solid. I get nostalgia, but for tapes...no thanks


I kept a bunch in a box that i thought might hold some value one day. Haven't looked in about 20 years. Gonna have to dig them out.

[FreddyFender]

Hell yeah. Cassette is the best format for rock and roll. You can find a tape under your bed from 20 years ago, toss it in the deck, and its good to go. Happened to me a number of times.

Van Halen's music was made to be listened to out of a filthy, paint-covered boombox in your garage. For me, cassette is the sound of the 80s.

[TREVERLAST]

It's been this way for a while now. I took a bunch of CDs and some tapes to a local record store (CD Trader - I'm sure Stevie knows this spot on Ventura Blvd.) They bought some of the CDs & they bought ALL of the tapes I had & even asked if I had any more. The ones worth money all the ones released towards the end of tape buying days. Thrash goes for a lot & 90's Hip Hop brings in big $$$$. No wonder Ghost, Crue, GNR & many others have been releasing & reissuing tapes.

[FreddyFender]

When Stranger Things happened, I sold my 90s Master of Puppets tape for $70 on eBay. Ain't life sweet.

[Metal Sludge]

The last cassette player I had, ate my Michael Monroe, Not Fakin' It tape. I was not happy! That was around 2001 I think. I bought the CD and all was right with the world.
About a year later, our good friend, DJ Will burned me a Rough Cutt CD from a cassette tape. I don't know how he made it sound so good, but that's the magic of DJ Will!
I still have that CD.

[diablomozart]

please god no 8 tracks...i hated when the song would fade out in the middle so it could switch tracks...d.m.

[pieceofme]

Hope not. That format sucked. CDs so much better.

[tooth]

I still have an Outdoor Walkman (the yellow one) that I'll fire up once in a while & play some cassettes through the Denon receiver. I kept mainly the home made/mix tapes & the bootlegs but yea, they don't sound all that great. Doubt I would ever buy a new cassette.

[greengoblinrulz]

While I have a ton of friends who've started back on the LP buying, Im still shocked when I go to friends houses for get togethers & see them running the tunes with cassettes. Is it a lot, no.... but there are absolutely enough to notice.

[DonJuanDeMarco]

Cassettes always sucked. Worst sound quality. Rewind/Fast Forward. The machine would eat them. All the artwork and lyrics were shrunk as small as possible.

The only GOOD thing about it was the blank tape. You could make copies and you could make the infamous MIX TAPE!

And don't forget trying to save a few bucks trying to record a song off the radio only to have the DJ talk over the entire intro!

But on the flip side (no pun intended!) it did lend itself to making you listen to the entire album. Certainly, you had a bigger attention span than simply clicking on a streaming music file. Fuck it...I guess I miss those cassette days. But CD's are way better, no doubt.

[DARTH SILKWORMS]

I still maintain a small collection of cassettes. Mainly singles that didn't get a domestic release on CD or rare stuff like GNR's debut EP, which didn't get a CD release anywhere.

But cassettes have always sucked. No matter how well you care for them, they will sound like shit before long.

And the modern cassettes labels are releasing sound even worse than original cassettes from the 80s.

[Wiseacre]

As someone who was doing home recordings from the early ‘80s and all through the ‘90s and has boxes of cassettes (homegrown and store bought) let me just say “fuck cassette tapes”. Probably the absolute worst sounding “modern” formats ever next to 8-track. Completely inconvenient unlike a record that you could at least pick up the needle and drop wherever. Tiny, shitty quality tape that every fucking car would munch on, if you recorded multitrack, gravity would pull them downward over time causing track bleed, and they always had a shitload of dropouts. Fuck them. Not to mention every single fucking tape deck played at a different speed/pitch. Also, unlike a big ass VHS tape if you tried to disassemble a fucked up cassette it was like threading a needle with boxing gloves. Like the Operation board game, but from hell. Worthless pieces of shit, they were.

YES, they were portable when it mattered and I spent a million hours driving around with friends reaching in the backseat for a killer tape everyone was too lazy to put back in the case. and yes they allowed regular people to do some home recording, but these days? Unlike vinyl where you might argue for a preferred sound quality over digital or maybe you like remembering staring at those big old album covers, cassettes are pure shit. Especially later on. Forget the digital volume wars, those ‘90s cassettes were duplicated with the volume BURIED in the red. Forget message boards, I would fistfight anyone who tried to convince me cassettes sound better than CDs. Good riddance to one of the coolest, but shittiest formats ever. They belong in a museum but not anyone’s stereo.

[Bono Nettencourt]

All physical media is valueless. This is just the next stupid old thing for "collectors" to collect.