Audio Video News

Vinyl is cool but cassettes are cooler. Apparently the cassette tape revival—oh, you hadn’t heard?—is greatly exaggerated.

From UK’s What Hi-Fi:

With part of the vinyl boom attributed to the fashion for retro tech, as illustrated by retailers such as Urban Outfitters selling turntables and vinyl, it was perhaps only natural that trend-setters would look to other 'retro' audio formats. Enter the cassette tape—and recent reports of its rise in popularity.

The Daily Mail this week reported that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the body in charge of certifying gold and platinum records, was investigating ways to track sales of cassette tapes due to an apparent surge in popularity and sales.

Bouyed by the success of niche underground releases on cassette tapes, the report suggested mainstream acts would soon be following suit. A cassette tape resurgence beckoned. Even Justin Bieber was on board, with his latest album already available to buy on cassette.

Alas, the RIAA has moved to quash any building excitement. The RIAA's VP of communications, Cara Duckworth Weiblinger, told Resident Advisor that they had not been notified of any noticeable uptake in 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," said Duckworth Weiblinger.

"It’s such a small number it doesn’t meet the threshold of sales requirements for us to report it (we report sales by category on a scale of millions of dollars and cassettes just haven’t broken that threshold). So there has been no increase in sales of cassettes or a proactive effort to look into tracking this further."

Read the full story here:

Well, if not cassettes, maybe…eight-track.

More about this retro rivalry, how it intersects with our prison population, and where cassettes are a real thing:

An Unexpected Reason for the Cassette Revival

NBC Nightly News Reports on the Cassette Revival