As cassettes come back, the dilemma is finding a tape deck

NEW YORK – When American pop star Taylor Swift released her re-recorded album 1989 (Taylor’s Version) in an array of physical formats in 2023, Ms Cora Buel knew she had to get the cassette right away.

The 48-year-old, who is based in Daly City, California, is a fan of Swift’s music – an affinity she shares with her teenage daughter, who has since bought her mother more tapes as gifts. One main reason? Ms Buel drives a 1998 BMW Z3, and has no other convenient options for on-the-road album playback.

“Just get an old car that plays only cassettes, and you’ll listen every day,” she said.

Although Ms Buel might be an extreme proponent of retro design – she works as chief revenue officer at online consignment store ThredUp – the cassette’s return is by now almost as unmistakable as its distinctive hiss and warble.

Dominant in the United States from the early 1980s until it was overtaken commercially by the CD in the early 1990s, the cassette tape has survived as an underground phenomenon, a deliberately anachronistic medium of choice for artists on the noise, avant-garde and lo-fi fringes.

But tapes began turning up at the trend-chasing retailer Urban Outfitters as long ago as 2015, the same year that digital streaming first overtook download sales. Nearly a decade later, Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department (2024), stands as the top-selling cassette of the year, with about 23,000 copies sold through June 30, according to tracking service Luminate.

Sure, Tortured Poets’ cassette sales pale beside its performance in other physical formats, where it boasts sales of 1.1 million copies on CD and 988,000 on vinyl.

But Tortured Poets alone is on pace to beat the total annual sales of all albums on cassette for as recently as 2009, when the Luminate precursor Nielsen SoundScan reported a mere 34,000 units shipped. If Spotify killed the iTunes star, and vinyl is increasingly a high-priced luxury item – never mind CDs for the moment – then cassettes could be the cockroaches that outlive them all.

As labels look to capitalise on “superfans” who will buy multiple formats, artistes releasing new music on cassette in 2024 cross genres and generations.

Though the last new car to be factory-equipped with a cassette deck was reportedly a 2010 Lexus, more than a quarter of light-duty vehicles on the road are at least 15 years old, according to a recent analysis by S&P Global Mobility.

Susanna Thomson of the Oakland, California, band Sour Widows still listens to cassettes in her 1998 Volvo wagon, which has a tape deck and CD player.

I-90, a song on the alternative-rock group’s bittersweet new album Revival Of A Friend (2024), includes lyrics about driving down the interstate while singing along repeatedly to a beloved cassette. The tape in question was by Southern California punk-rock outfit Joyce Manor.

“I have a little cassette library in my car that just stays there, and I’ll rotate tapes out,” she said.

At 29, Thomson presumably grew up after the cassette’s heyday, but she said that listening to tapes was partly grounded in nostalgia for her. There is an element of protest too.

Being passionate about cassettes, vinyls and CDs, can be “an act of resistance against the powers-that-be that have their horrible fingers in the world of art”, said Thomson.

While Thomson also has a Sony Walkman-style portable cassette player, it has a broken part and she does not know how to fix it.

To cassette listeners without access to cars of a certain age and their tape decks, Thomson’s tale of a busted Walkman might have a familiar ring. The best-known audio equipment manufacturers of the cassette era have long since exited the market.

Sony sold more than 200 million Walkmans from July 1979, when the devices debuted in Japan, until the music stopped around 2010. Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba and Bose no longer sell audio tape players, representatives for each of the four companies confirmed.

The Consumer Technology Association, a trade group in the US, stopped tracking sales of combination radio/cassette/CD players in 2016, when there were an estimated 653,671 units shipped, compared with a likely peak of about 25 million radio/cassette combos in 1994, according to a spokesperson.

Although the market for new cassette players became too small to bother measuring, a vast supply of the ostensibly obsolete gadgets was already in existence, in various states of repair, waiting to be rediscovered.

If cassettes are popular, it is in part because they are cheap for do-it-yourself artistes and independent labels to get made. For one recent title on American musician Jack White’s record label Third Man Records, cassettes cost US$2.80 (S$3.65) apiece to produce versus US$6.92 a vinyl LP, said musician Ben Blackwell, one of the label’s founders. Tape enthusiasts’ preferences in playback devices can be similarly economical.

Some new manufacturers have entered the cassette market, meeting a simmering demand but confronting a vastly different supply-side landscape than in the 1990s. FiiO, an electronics company with headquarters in Guangzhou, China, recently debuted a bare-bones, Walkman-style cassette player that sells for about US$100.

“The biggest challenge has been the near-complete disruption of the cassette player supply chain,” said the company’s chief executive James Chung in a statement. “Restoring the technical prowess of 1990s Walkman devices is virtually impossible today.”

Then again, vinyl record production has largely overcome a similar supply squeeze in the past decade.

Paris-based start-up We Are Rewind introduced its own minimalist, Walkman-like tape player via Kickstarter in 2020, citing inspiration from the time-worn cassette deck at the heart of the Guardians Of The Galaxy film franchise (2014 to 2023) and from the 1980s-retro Netflix hit series Stranger Things (2016 to present).

Retailing for about US$160 and up, We Are Rewind’s portable tape machines also offer Bluetooth connectivity for wireless listening.

While the company’s chief executive Romain Boudruche acknowledged an initial struggle to find suppliers, he said We Are Rewind sold almost 20,000 cassette players in 2023 and hopes to double that number in 2024. He outlined plans for a smaller version and a boombox, plus collaborations with artistes and brands.

“The possibilities are really big, even if it’s still a niche,” Mr Boudruche said. NYTIMES