by anigbrowl | 2025-12-09 07:06:16+00:00
Strong disagree. This trend has been underway for a few years already. There are a few reasons for this:

1. Musicians love tape. We like the frequency roll-off, we like the imprecision - but these are nostalgia. What we like most is the with tape your options are largely reduced to Record and Play, because doing anything more complicated (eg editing via punch-ins with synchronization) is such a PITA. They're a great tool for just making you commit to a performance instead of editing it to death.

2. In similar fashion, young people are fascinated by a medium you have to sit through by default, because skipping around is inconvenient and might damage your tape. Not being able to listen nonlinearly promotes a different sort of engagement with the material from the fragmented one provided by streaming. To a lesser extent, music on tape has better dynamics not because the medium is superior, but because maximizing loudness over the entire track means the whole recording will be saturated. This is desirable in some genres (metal, some kinds of dance music), but most cassette recordings avoid maximizing loudness which sounds refreshingly different to people who grew up during the Loudness War.

3. Chinese bootlegs. In the 80s and 90s China was a target country for first world garbage disposal, so unsold CDs and cassettes would be damaged by being run through a table saw and then shipped to China in bulk for recycling, sold by weight. While publication or importation of western music was heavily restricted by censors, garbage imports were uncontrolled, and enterprising minds soon observed that damaged media could often be rendered playable, at at least in part. This led to the emergence of a "dakou" (打口 - saw cut) music scene, with parts of albums being sold to enthusiasts in semi underground stores with no regard to release date, genre, or marketing campaigns. This had a big impact on China's domestic music scene.

4. Differing media preferences. Other countries (but Japan in particular) never lost the taste for physical media the way Anglosphere countries did. Japan was always record collectors' paradise because industry cartelism kept the price of physical media high, but buyers were rewarded with high production quality of CD mastering, vinyl grade, and printed media, and labels would typically add bonus tracks exclusive to the Japanese editions of albums. A combination of Japanese taste for the best-quality version of something and 30+ years of economic stagnation meant Japanese consumers were more into maintaining and using their hifi equipment; if you watch Japanese TV dramas a fancy stereo is still a common status marker, much like expensive furniture. Record stores are still a big deal, and music appreciation its own distinct hobby and and social activity in a way that fell out of fashion in other countries.

5. Developing world and cheap distribution. Cassettes were popular in Africa and other developing economies for decades for reasons that should be obvious, and they're popular again with emerging/underground artists for similar reasons. You can self-release on cassette very very cheaply, at the loss of time efficiency. You won't make much money doing this, but you can make a bit, and it's a way to target serious fans who like collecting things and want to support obscure and cool artists who have not yet got big and sold out. Also making $3 on a cassette sale through Bandcamp or at a show may be easier than 1-2000 plays on Spotify or some other service for artists who are not already famous. Self-releasing on vinyl is also possible but typically you need to invest $1-2000, whereas you can get into duplicating your own cassettes for $50 or a few hundred $ in bulk. Vinyl is the way to go if you need to reach DJs but cassette players are dirt cheap or free for consumers and are less effort to use than a record player.

Physical media are still a Big Deal for people who obsess over music, who care about quite different things from the median consumer.