Cassettes Are Back, and It’s Not About the Music
The technology may be obsolete, but it’s associated with attractive stories that the streaming generation wants to try on.
For romantics, not audiophiles.
Photographer: Mohd Rasfan/AFP/Getty Images
One can explain the recent boom in vinyl record sales in terms that make sense to an audiophile; a vinyl record will often sound more nuanced than music in a compressed digital format. But the growing audio cassette sales don’t lend themselves to such technical explanations: They’re about culture and psychology rather than sound.
The hissing cassette was never music lovers’ first choice. The only reason these things were popular throughout my childhood and adolescence in the 1970s and ‘80s was their portability: You could play them on a boom box, in a car, on a Walkman when these appeared 40 years ago. The CD killed them off more ruthlessly than it did vinyl records: There was simply no reason to compromise so deeply on sound quality anymore.