Pre-Recorded Cassette Tape Albums are rising in prices!!!

The radio recordings sound like a good idea. Maybe there's something on Sirius xm I might find worthy of taping. Or even some youtube finds. With my Bluetooth connection and the internet, I have options we didn't have before.

 

I no longer have a Walkman but I like the idea of laying down material of a lost time. I played one of the old tapes I have and it was something I recorded off the radio in the 80's. It was just oldies but they played different oldies than they typically play today.

 

They're still very cheap where I am in the UK, the problem is finding them.
Most charity shops won't stock them and I'm guessing a lot of them end up in the bin.

I find the majority of mine at car boot sales but even then they're not as plentiful as they used to be.

 

For one reason or another, I was working abroad and had a car with a cassette player in it - this was some years ago. I found a local second hand shop, who had exactly one cassette on sale, Manfred Manns Earth Band, Nightingales and Bombers. I drove around for a while playing nothing but this album, and loved it. The cassette tape snapped, as they do. I came home, thought nothing more of it, until I bought a vinyl copy in one of my vinyl hunting expeditions.

It was like a different album. The cassette version had a cruddy, hissy underpowered charm all of its own, while the bright, powerful vinyl sound (it is a particularly clean copy) stripped away all of its foggy, old world feel.

Like all recorded media, sometimes this old fashioned stuff just does it for you, particularly if you are *from* that time.....

 

I listen to cassettes. My truck has a cassette player, i'm sure many people still have them in their vehicles. I've listned to cassettes all my lif and I have no plans to stop using them. I am not a hipster either!

 

Ha! A lot of eBay sellers have been charging the Earth for cassettes in Australia for years. The average single is Au$15 and the average album is Au$25. I say: No.

I also say: You should see my collection at the moment!



You know, in the early 1980's, cassettes used to come with a graph to show you how good they were compared to the previous model



But by the late 1990's they were just a bunch of dicks

 

It happens. I noticed that several of the tapes I gave away a few years ago are going for $20 or more each now. And even more crazy is several of the VHS tapes I gave away or even threw away are going for as much as $100 each for obscure 80s horror movies that were hard to get more than five bucks or so 5-6 years ago.

I'll also add that visiting a local record store I hadn't been to in about 10 years was quite a different experience. I used to regularly go in and the majority of the store was walls of vinyl for $1 or the usual fare stuff for $2-5 each. Now the same store didn't even have a dollar bin and albums that would have been in those bins a few years ago were now $5-10 each. Plenty of folks are trying to ride the "vinyl resurgence" wave and I suppose it's now extending to cassette and vhs as well.