First Vinyl and Now Cassettes

Cassettes may be set for a comeback. 

 Cassette tapes are back, baby.

Sales of the retro recordings have skyrocketed over the past few years. Since 2017, the number of cassette tapes sold in the U.S. has been increasing by double-digit percentages every year (33 percent from 2019 to 2020).

The rise in cassette popularity is partially fueled by the pandemic. Artists were forced to cancel gigs, but still needed a way to get new music out—cassettes were a cheap way to do it. Another contributing factor is the sound the format produces.

Steve Stepp, the president of National Audio Company in Springfield, Missouri—the only producer of magnetic tape for cassettes in the United States, and the largest manufacturer of the format in the world—notes that by and large, the biggest consumer group of audio cassettes right now is those under 35.

“Your ears are analog,” Stepp says. “The world around you is analog. When you hear music and it’s an actual artist, band or orchestra playing, you’re hearing all levels of frequencies at each millisecond. Your ears are built to listen to that. It’s called harmonics. But in a digital recording, there are no harmonics. You’re listening to the dominant frequency at each millisecond.”

Producers of digital recordings continue to strive for the harmonics cassettes can capture.

“The higher the sampling rate [the speed at which samples, or measurements throughout audio tracks, are taken] of a digital recording, the better it sounds,” Stepp adds. “As the sampling rate gets high enough, the recording begins to approximate an analog recording. It is a digital picture of an analog recording.”

The Covid-19 pandemic forced many artists to cancel their gigs, and in turn, they needed a way to release new music cheaply. For those not signed to a major label, that meant cassette tapes. Cassettes can be produced in small quantities—sometimes as low as 50 tapes in a run—and cost about $2.50 per tape. CDs require a high minimum run, and vinyl is prohibitively expensive for many smaller artists. Plus, musicians would be able to hand out the cassettes, instead of fighting major artists for digital air time when they couldn’t have shows. Bigger-name artists soon took notice of the trend, and since the pandemic began, musicians like Lady Gaga, Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift have had their music released on cassettes. Now, even major motion picture soundtracks are hitting the shelves as cassette tapes. National Audio’s sales are through the roof, reaching the biggest highs since the company began with no signs of slowing down.