Photo: Stephanie Kotsikonas
Constantly rewinding. Praying that the thin brown, reflective ream holding your favorite album doesn’t get caught in and pulled by the spokes of your boombox. Having to deal with the wonky sounds that came from over-playing.
Listening to cassettes was nothing short of nerve wracking in the decades before CD’s or iTunes. So, when news outlets around the globe like Bloomberg report that cassette sales are “back and better than ever,” it’s hard to believe music consumers would take a daunting trip back in time when there are more convenient and accessible options available to them.
“Tapes are a very minor affair,” said Bleecker Street Records General Manager Peter Kaye. “It’s mostly older guys who have cassette players in their cars. There’s also the occasional young person who buys them for novelty’s sake.”
According to Bloomberg, the National Audio Company, the largest surviving cassette factory in the U.S., sold over 10 million tapes in 2014 — making it its best selling year since its opening in 1969. “Probably the thing that has really enlarged our business at a faster phase than anything is the retro movement,” National Audio Company President Steve Stepp told Bloomberg. “There’s the nostalgia of holding the audio cassette in your hand.”
However, sales at local music shops in New York City, places known for trendy and nostalgic purchases like cassettes and vinyl records, tell a different story. Bleecker Street Records’ small collection of tapes, which consists mainly of trance music with a copy of Janis Joplin’s Pearl thrown in, sits untouched in the store’s basement. Customers sift through nearby rows of jazz, country and blues records while not giving the large black crate full of cassettes a second thought.
While some may argue that lack of sales are due to the store’s scant selection, Kaye said that even desirable newer release albums, like a cassette tape reissue of NWA’s Straight Outta Compton released in the wake of the popular film of the same name, remain on store shelves.
Similarly, when a seller brought in his collection of highly sought-after and rare Brazilian LPs and tapes, Kaye said that while the records gained revenue, the tapes were a different story. “Even though that music is hard to come by, the tapes were a very hard sell,” he said.
Generations Unlimited at Academy Records CDs. Photo: Stephanie Kotsikonas
Workers at Academy Records and CDs, a long-running music shop located in NYC’s Flatiron District, also don’t buy into the idea of a cassette craze, though the store has been selling tapes for about six months with some customer interest. “There appears to be some sort of nostalgia,” Charles, an Academy Records employee said. (Editor’s note: This employee asked not to reveal his last name in this article.) “People are abandoning digital, so they’re grasping onto analog.”
While they cater mostly to releases on CD and vinyl, the shop also maintains a healthy selection of albums on tape, including many of New York City-based artists that produce experimental and electronic music — genres that Charles said are usually released on cassette. A small and neat collection of white-spine cassettes released by Generations Unlimited, an experimental music record label founded in 1987, sits on the wooden shelf above the used rock LPs. Academy Music employees said that most of GU’s cassette releases were originally distributed through the mail, an arrangement that allows listeners a chance to experience the locally recorded music as it was originally intended and circulated.
Despite the music industry’s push to produce new releases on cassettes — on Twitter alone hundreds of posts promote upcoming albums from record labels and independent musicians — The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) released a statement in February stating that the company would not start tracking cassette tape sales. “We regularly check with our music label members to see if they are reporting any change in the sales of cassettes, but there hasn’t been for quite some time,” Vice President of Communications Cara Duckworth Weiblinger said. “It’s such a small number it doesn’t meet the threshold of sales requirements for us to report it.”
It remains to be seen if the cassette tape’s dramatic comeback as Bloomberg reported will take shape like the resurgence of vinyl records. But inside a cramped, Greenwich Village record store, amid stacks of cardboard boxes filled with of LPs, Rebel Rebel Records owner David Shebiro remains skeptical as to the format’s overall appeal.
“People do [buy cassettes],” he said. “But I don’t know why.”