Stop. Rewind. Cassettes are back?

Remember the days when we made mixtapes of our favourite tracks, sitting by the stereo with an index finger tentatively hovering over the record button for that one song we’d been waiting for to play on the radio? Oh, and that time that everyone had a Walkman?

For most of us, this era has become a hazy and distant memory since the digital age of iPods, Spotify accounts and Youtube playlists. However, in recent years, more and more independent record labels and artists internationally have turned to tape as a retro-chic and, more importantly, cheap way of physically putting out music. This has seen the cassette firmly regain some street cred and make its way out of the garages of the underground DIY scene and back into the mainstream. Who would have thought it?

I’m not saying that you can go to HMV and bag yourself a cassette of Taylor Swift’s newest album. That will probably never happen. But according to the music buffs, those of us with a treasured tape collection gathering dust in the loft can now resurface it without embarrassment, gaining some fashion kudos and joining the wave of listeners enjoying tangible formats of music. Here’s the proof: in the past five years, cassette sales have boomed with Sean Borhman, co-founder of Burger Records, confirming the label has sold almost 300,000 of them. What’s more, Disney of all companies released a Guardians of the Galaxy mixtape actually on cassette, the first in over a decade, and September 2014 saw the celebration of the second annual Cassette Store day with collaborations from the likes of Julian Casablancas + The Voidz and Karen O. It’s safe to say that cassettes have definitely become a ‘thing’.

But does this seemingly infectious craze mean that this semester we’ll be taking to the streets of St. Andrews with newly bought boomboxes? Does it mean that we’ll be spending hours recording tracks from the radio to make a mixtape for our next pre-drinks? Nah, unlikely. Let’s face it, as much as we might all like a ghetto blaster, it would be wildly inconvenient to carry to the library, the whole forwarding and rewinding thing to find a track is annoying, and the tape in the cassette can get scrunched up to name a few niggles. Even for the die-hard music geek looking for a raw recorded sound and retro style, that coloured plastic rectangle just doesn’t match up to its vinyl counterpart.

So yeah, the cassette has returned to our music store shelves and it’s gaining in popularity, but I don’t think we will be abandoning our mp3 or record players for a radio-cassette player anytime soon.

Image courtesy of Creative Commons by tobifirestone – FOTObs Fotografie