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

Hi everyone. For some reason, cassette tape albums have been rising in prices on Ebay, especially new/sealed tapes. Anyone know why? Are people trying to get back into cassettes?

 

It's the latest hipster thing. You can find used pre recorded Cassettes at most Indie Record stores as well as Amoeba. Kinda like Laserdiscs a few years ago.

 

8-tracks bottomed out around 1982. By about 1995, people were starting to collect them again. So that was about 13 years.

Cassettes bottomed out around 2002 or so. We're now at 2015. And people are starting to look at cassettes as possible collectibles.

 

I wonder if the "Guardians of the Galaxy" movie had anything to do with it???

 

Pentagram just released Curious Volume on cassette, and reissued Relentless the same way. It looks like there's an ongoing revival. I have some mixed feelings. Logically speaking, the thing is, if you're looking for analogue, why play a cassette when you can play LP records (or reel-to-reel, for that matter, if you insist on tape)? LPs are better for home listening, the CD is better for portable use.... Maybe what we need is a Reel-to-Reel Tape revival.

 

I had a couple of odd, double cassette packages I got in Australia in 1988, by The Church, and sold them a year or so ago for was more money than I paid.....i mean, they were weird, just a flat cassette box that fit two tapes, never saw the format ever again, and they were certainly not new......even if people do buy cassttes, do the have the machines to play them back?

 

Teac makes some nice ones. Still, it's not as easy to find a good tapedeck these days.

 

Is it 2008?

 

Is it 1988?

 

I wish.

 

I do miss cassettes in a nostalgic kind of way but I agree this is just a trendy hipster thing. No-one could argue that they sound better than CDs and keep a straight face. There's no more merit in a cassette revival than there would be in resurrecting VHS.

Now bringing back reel to reel, on the other hand...

 

1981 more like it. Cd's were big in 1988

 

I'd be so down for a reel to reel revival, especially if it meant new cheaper machines hitting the market.

 

Biggest regret is when I was a kid I chose cassettes over vinyl. By the time I realised cassettes are crap I had 100s of them.
They either lose sound or sounded crap from the start.

I am staggered why anyone would want one today.

 

I could totally go for that. But we know what'd happen: record companies would release everything at 3 ¾ with overpriced audiophile versions at 7 ½. They'd mess it up.

As for cassettes, this is purely a hipster thing. The quality is lousy (unlike records) and the cover art isn't big (ostensibly one of the reasons records have caught on again). I hope this doesn't last.

Ed

 

P.T. Barnum has been resurrected?

 

My friends and I could not afford CDs in 1988, virtually everything I bought up until the mid 1990s was on cassette or LP.

 

8-tracks actually sound good, though

 

Mid '90's? LP's had taken a siesta back then. Cassettes? Very much on the way out. Where were you getting new releases on LP and cassette? No snark, just curiosity.

Ed

 

Amen. I had a very hard time finding on in decent shape and paid an unpretty penny once I did. We both know, though, that if they came back into vogue, Crosley would start making RTR machines for the Barnes and Noble crowd.

Ed

 

I was still buying some here and there as late as 2001, as I had a pretty nice Sony deck in my car and they were just cheaper. How much longer they remained in stores after that I couldn't say, but there was no shortage of new releases even that far on.

 

Ah, it was earlier than that. I was actually cassette-only until mid-late 1998, myself (was in the 8th grade at the time). You could still buy tapes in almost all music stores at that point, but there weren't too many of them. I'd say the tapes were basically gone by 2000. Though you could still find them in clearance bins and liquidators and in more rural places as late as 2005.

Again, I'd say any mall music store still had cassettes of the vast majority of new releases until 1999. Though the sections were noticeably shrinking. The last tape I considered buying was Pulp's This Is Hardcore...around Halloween of 1999. Ended up putting in the extra $5 or so for the CD, since it had an extra track.

I did pick up a few tapes out of clearance bins during a road trip in 2004 and even once as late as 2006 -- 25 cents for a sealed copy of Leonard Cohen's Various Positions.

 

Cassette sales were higher in 1988 than they were in 1981 by more than 100 million units.

 

That's the biggest problem I have with cassette tapes. LPs sound nice (when properly done), and the large cover art is the cherry on the top. Cassettes are just too small to be a main format (eg. CDs, LPs), and too fragile to be a portable format (eg. CDs, FLAC Files).

 

I have 600 or so of the blighters........and 9 cassette decks ......just kept finding better decks ......the last one was a Denon 110 , highly reviewed back in the day.
Found it in a Sally Army for $5 ex condition, left it thinking someone would buy it , went by there several hours later ,it was still on the shelf so then I knew I had
to buy it.
Got it home, played a tape , perfect, never used it since!