Huh? Now a cassette resurgence? Fascinating WSJ article

This was a great read, both interesting and surprising. Did anybody here know all this was going on? Interestingly, I just got through refreshing my mom's audio system and in the process re-connected her old cassette deck. I did play one cassette and it sounded decent, but at my age I probably just couldn't hear the tape hiss, lol.

A Global Shortage of Magnetic Tape Leaves Cassette Fans Reeling

 

I'll have to look around elsewhere to access the article as I don't subscribe to the WSJ, but thanks for posting.

Indie labels, some entirely cassette format based, have been releasing cassettes for years, now. I'd say it really took off post 2010, although I have some cassettes I bought from bands around 2007, too.
My local record store has a large selection of cassettes, even from major labels that seem to have started re-pressing titles.

 

Hmm... I don't have a subscription either, but I was able to read the article.

 

Video from the article.

 

Thinking back on cassettes, it's hard to come up with ANYTHING positive, other than their portability. I'm still scarred by the chewing, stretching, crunkling, fankling, relentless winding on a pencil......and lets not forget having to glue the two burst ends of tape together with cellotape when you've finally given up trying to tease it out of the mechanism!! NEVER AGAIN!!

 

That was very cool! Thanks for posting!

 

I´m waiting for wax cylinders.

 

I'm still undecided between the DAT renaissance and the rebirth of the MP3. Decisions, decisions...what to do?

 

Thank you.

 

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Per Why the Cassette Tape Is Still Not Dead

Why the Cassette Tape Is Still Not Dead

"From its last major manufacturer to its indie label champion, here's how the jewel of 1980s audio kept its grip on the American music scene



Burger Records in Fullerton, California has built a popular label around releasing young acts on cassette. Wally Skalij/LA Times/Getty

By Michael Hunt
April 18, 2016

On a mid-January morning in Springfield, Mo., a tractor-trailer backs up to the National Audio Company's loading dock and unloads more than 600,000 empty compact cassette shells from factories in China and Saudi Arabia. The shipment is added to a warehouse inventory of another 10 million or so of the multi-colored, plastic cartridges awaiting tape inside the country's largest cassette manufacturer. About 50 workers, including recording engineers and graphic artists, assemble up to 100,000 preordered tapes a day to satisfy demand for a product that might otherwise seem obsolete. "Most people would probably think there aren't 100,000 cassettes left in the world," National Audio's owner Steve Stepp tells me. "I've got an order of 87,000 going out today."

Housed in a six-story brick structure that once produced another relic — the agricultural horse collar — National Audio has managed to stay solvent selling blank and spoken-word tapes. During the Nineties, as the industry moved to compact disc, the company bought up much of the idle cassette-making machinery around the country for pennies on the dollar. Then they waited for a cassette revival that almost no one else saw coming.

"There are two reasons why we stuck in there," says Stepp, casually dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt. "One is stubbornness and one is stupidity. I'm a very stubborn person and I'm a very optimistic person. The stupidity part is we didn't know the cassette was dead. We were told it was dead and we never believed it. We just hung in there long enough. And we know that the market is what we thought it would be. It's come back."

Last year, National Audio sold about $5 millions worth of cassettes, a 31 percent increase in sales from the previous year. Seventy percent of the firm's business comes from independent labels and largely unknown bands, but a number of majors are following the trend. Sony, Capitol, Disney, and Universal Music Group all have made orders on behalf of some of their larger clients; National Audio even manufactured a cassette for Justin Bieber last year.

The plant also makes tapes for Nirvana, Keith Richards, Judas Priest, Ice Cube and Weezer, among others. It made 25,000 cassettes for the recent release of a seven-song demo Metallica recorded in 1982, "No Life 'Til Leather." The company's in-house graphics department replicated drummer Lars Ulrich's original handwriting and artwork for the cassette that is now fetching up to $50 on eBay. "We love the majors, and that's where you do your big volume, but we would not be here doing what we're doing if not for the indie band," Stepp says. "Indie bands are responsible for this return."

Whether the order comes from a garage band or Bieber, National Audio rarely charges more than $2 a tape, including engineering, labeling, J-card artwork, wrapping, packing and shipping. But the cassette's revival is more about the meaning of materiality in the age of ephemera. It is tangible and colorful and mechanical; its moving inner workings have a quasi-steam-punk feel; it conveys arty, retro-cool in ways that a stream of 0s and 1s cannot.

On the factory floor, master tapes move from one of six sound studios for duplication by in-house engineers and then to vintage tape slaves and loaders. It takes less than 10 seconds for 90 minutes of tape to be threaded into a plastic cartridge. Releases from Doom Ghost, Rozwell Kid, Weekend and Hellkite spit out at the end of the assembly line. "They're all hoping to be famous one day," Stepp says. "Dreams aren't made until you make that first tape."



Music cassettes for sale at Burger Records in Fullerton, California. Wally Skalij/LA Times/Getty

The epicenter of modern cassette music culture is in a strip mall on South State College Boulevard in Fullerton, California. Between a tattoo parlor and a massage joint, Burger Records runs its label in a cluttered, curtained-off back room where one of the owners sleeps on the couch at night. Its founders, Sean Bohrman and Lee Rickard, were pals at Anaheim high school and members of a local power-pop band Three Makeout Party, when they decided to start the label in 2007. A Burger cassette has since become a right of passage for California's glut of emerging lo-fi talent. "When we started we didn't know there was going to be a cassette revival," Bohrman says. "We just wanted to put these awesome albums on cassettes because nobody else was."

Bohrman quit his day job as art director at a boating magazine and cashed in his 401K to start the record store. "We got made fun of when we started releasing cassettes, because it was like, 'Why?'" Bohrman says. "We just kept doing it because we were poor and that's all we could afford."

Burger's catalog now has over 1,000 releases, including albums from Brian Jonestown Massacre and Devon Williams. The label hosts an annual Burgerama festival in nearby Santa Ana, and there have been Burger-themed shows in San Francisco, Paris, Stockholm, Milan, Melbourne and Tel Aviv. "It's big to be on the Burger scene," says Justin Eckley, who has released two albums on the label. "We just went up to Seattle and back. Just saying we're a Burger band and we put out a new cassette with them got us booked. I don't think the tour would have been as good had we not had the Burger label behind us."

Burger sells cassettes for no more than $5 each. While National Audio has found a way to turn a profit, purveyors on the artistic grassroots side of the cassette revival are still trying to figure out how to earn a living on mid-20th-century technology. "How do you put a price on a counterculture or a teen scene?" Rickard asks. "We've invested a lot and been selfless in that sense. We don't know how much longer we can continue that path without bankrupting ourselves finically, spiritually. It's the Wild West. Anything goes. It's got us this far. It's fun, but people are snakes. There are agendas everywhere."

Still, there are moments to celebrate, like when Green Day chose Burger to rerelease their 1994 smash hit Dookie. "I usually don't get nostalgic about things, but Dookie, wow, Dookie," Bohrman says. "My dad wouldn't let me listen to the record because they cussed on it. Now I'm designing the artwork, and he's proud. That's a record we grew up with and now it's a part of the Burger catalog."

Of course, the culture of the cassette, like sentimental love for Dookie, is partly nostalgic, but it's also about a medium that holds up. "We're old school," Rickard says. "We're into analog. We like touching things. We like feeling. We're sensitive. And take things to heart. It's the binary code. So much is lost in translation, frequencies and things, it's hard to describe in nature what it is. The computer can only pick up ones and zeros. Things get lost."

 

Wonderful words! Describes one of the problems perfectly.

 

Sometimes I think some of you live in caves.

 

Cassettes can be quite good



Unfortunately the current cassette resurgence can't use the technologies that helped cassette to become high quality. There is no more type II tape, much less type IV. And Dolby chips aren't made any more.

 

The cassette resurgence/fad is so 2014! Or maybe even earlier?

Small indie or non-label bands have been putting out stuff on cassette (oftentimes cassette only) for the past four years or more. Record stores in my area, like Amoeba, have been catering to this fad for a while now. This is by no means a new thing.

And while it would be nice to have a decent, functioning cassette deck to play an old cassette now and then (my not-so-great Yamaha deck from the early 90s died a while ago, so my two boxes of cassettes have been stashed away in the depths of a closet), I don't feel compelled to get into this trend.

I'm just wondering when the CD fad is going to start.

 

Are you going to try a box of these?

 

They are expensive...and probably excellent.

But not ready to buy 100 of them...

"Quantity:

(min 100, max 2500)"

 

Ah, cassettes. As a PSA for those unfamiliar, if you have cassettes make sure you also have good ol' six-sided pencils. I'm also having flashbacks to the days when seeing unspooled cassette tape streaming across roadways was a fairly common sight.

 

When I moved out of my parents place so many years ago i threw away probably close to 100 cassettes, originals. i kept some but only have about 50 or so now.

 

I always say the CD is really dead when they stop selling them at Walmart...Then the CD revival starts about a day later!

 

This whole resurgence thing is because a bunch of millennials discovered an old technology that is new to them. They marvelled at it because it sounds decent and no computer needed. They think tape hiss is "real". They don't even realize or care that the sound of cheap tape made on cheap machines and duplicators sucks. There are very few decent decks around that they can afford, and scarce quality blank tape, so I doubt many are into rolling their own.

I'm not convinced that compact cassettes are a "thing" yet. Vinyl is a "thing", but it's getting damn expensive, and too many people still don't have access to decent stereos to play records on. It's worse for cassettes. maybe when Crossley starts cranking out cheap-ass cassette decks sold in Target and Walmart, and I see titles in those stores, i'll believe it. I'll also believe it when TDK and Maxell (if they are still around) starts selling blanks again. Right now, it's just indie bands and Warner Music trying to capitalize on it.

 

Maxell still exist and they still make tapes, albeit basic ferrics.

 

That's OK. I always got good results with ferrics. TDK for me, though.

 

If your record store is devoting space to cassette tapes, which are cheaper than most things in the store, I'd presume, than it's probably a thing.
They'd fill the space with something else if there wasn't demand.
It may well be a loss leader for a record store but it's existed in stores for awhile, now.
Even Amazon sells tapes, now.