Is There Really a Market For Cassette Tapes These Days?

I was on Ebay looking for music and ran across some auctions for cassette tapes. Most were within the $.99 to $5.99 starting bid range but a few were $20.00!! One was a Madonna cassette but i don't recall the others. Plus cassette decks are selling for $200. I can definitely see the market for vinyl but cassette tapes?

 

The problem with buying used cassettes is that you can't inspect them easily before purchasing.....it may play fine for a couple songs and then get to the part where the former owner's '85 Camaro tape deck ate the thing. Or it might look good but have zero top end from being played on a deck that was never demagnetized. But I'm happy to know that cassette decks are selling for $200; I have 3 of them gathering dust right now.

 

I don't think there's been a real market for them since the early 90's.

 

Don't worry, they will become the new hipster accessory soon enough!!!!

 

They've been fairly popular among hipsters for the last year or two. Lots of limited edition pressings of 500 tapes by no-name bands, for example.

 

I recently had to buy an $8 tape deck at Goodwill since my previous model broke. I can enjoy once again my old tapes that I never bothered to get on another format and tape things from internet feeds.

 

What I was going to say. However, I travel to Raleigh once or twice a year, and note that while Nice Price Books still sells cassettes, it looks like they're just too stubborn or lazy to change the layout. It doesn't look like a tape has sold in five years.

 

No. Flawed medium then; still flawed today.

 

I've never been sure what 'hipster' means, but this is correct--cassettes are more popular now (here, at least) than they've been in the last 20 years. every bedroom indie label I come into contact with has been releasing short runs of their artists on tapes, usually handmade.

 

Wilco made 200 cassette copies of their last release, "The Whole Love," with proceeds going to charity. They have since sold out, so I don't know the cost.

 

I had cassettes for many years, and still do. None are pre-recorded. I always made my own tapes, from good vinyl, recorded on the best available blank tape.
Still have them, and a tape deck in my system. Some great sounding music there too. Some "mixes" that I made 20 years ago that I probably would not be able to
put together today.

 

There are plenty of vintage cassettes available. The problem is finding the 1979 Chevy Impala to go with them.

 

Why the hell would anyone want to listen to cassettes?

Like 8 Tracks before them, the format died for a reason.

I've got a box of old cassettes - maybe I can make some bucks off some stupid hipsters on ebay!

 

I actually need a good double-deck player with adjustable level controls, so perhaps I better get on it...

 

While depricated technologies fade away, they never die completely. The market for re-recorded cassettes peaked in 1988, and demand bottomed out in 2004. Yet, in 2012:

1. Cassette singles still have a following in the UK. (Story)
2. Sales of pre-recorded cassettes fuel the growth of the music industry in Africa. (Story)

All Things Must Pass. Maybe.

Cheers!

 

Well, I'm hoping people following my Cure album by album thread still have a cassette player somewhere, because for me the cassette version of the Standing on a Beach compilation which includes the B sides is THE definitive Cure compilation, and one of the greatest of all time.

 

A label like :
http://www.burgerrecords.org
Has released in january a new tape every day !!!

 

Cassettes can sound magnificent.
More often than not, pre-recorded tapes don't.

 

A guy who was a regular at the quarterly record meets around here had a nice sideline business selling cassettes as a third party Amazon dealer.Sold off his vinyl and concentrates on the tapes nowadays.What sells?MOR stuff that was always pretty hard to find to begin with. Tells a story of a Robert Goulet Columbia Christmas comp(Special Products item) that he would buy for fifty cents(maybe less) and resell for five bucks.That's a pretty good markup no matter what you're selling.

 

Not to mention the K7 of Concert, which includes the Curiosity set of live odds and ends going right back to the days when they were still known as Easycure. Man, CD reissues of both of those would be awesome RSD items...

 

You've obviously heard a Nakamichi or Tandberg cassette deck. It was a flawed medium for cheap decks and the prerecorded crap but a top quality deck could make recordings that were indistinguishable from vinyl.

 

There are a handful of tracks (mostly Demo Cassettes, Cassette-only B Sides, and albums from poor countries) that haven't been released on CD, which means there are still quite a few valuable cassettes that people will pay money for.

Cassettes of widely available material are only seriously bought by people in third world countries, and even that's dying out. Collectors and hipsters buy them too but have access to better recordings of the material.

Doesn't make sense for anyone to listen to cassettes if they have access to better quality recordings of the material. Cassettes snap and warp without warning and can become completely unlistenable.

There are a few cassette only labels who release demos or EPs as cassette exclusives in order to make them difficult to pirate, and to ensure people will pay money to have them on CD, which I think is quite an interesting idea.

 

the plusses about cassettes are still plusses today. the minuses are still the minuses. It's a remarkably consistant media.

 

I certainly don't see as much magnetic tape wrapped up in hedges and trees alongside roads these days. That would suggest we are a long way off a comeback!

 

There's a huge demand for 1970s-era blank cassette tapes. Check the sale prices on ebay. A case of 10 Maxell XLI-S tapes just sold for more than $230, and that's consistent with many other sales I've monitored. Denon blanks sell for even more.