The 'retro' reappearance of cassette tapes is just silly
Some things are in the past for a reason
I was born in 1983, so I grew up in the era of CDs. My dad was one of the first people in his social group to get a CD player in the mid 1980s, and I think it still works. Vinyl records were still around but were already looking like something of an anachronism, and hadn’t yet enjoyed their renaissance as people became disillusioned with the flat sound of MP3s (that flat sound is a result of the huge compression of such files and has nothing to do with them being a digital format per se, although those two facts are often conflated).
So it was that when I was a yout, I listened to a lot of music on cassette tapes, mostly copies of CDs, vinyl records or other cassette tapes, but also recorded off the radio1. The Walkman totally revolutionised the way people listened to music, and cassette tapes were an essential part of that. You could carry your music around with you - amazing! You had to carry tapes with you, each one of which would hold a maximum of 90 minutes of audio, but at the time that seemed like a good solution; it was just how things worked.
Discmans (Discmen?) were available for playing CDs on the move, but they were incredibly sensitive to jogging, by which I mean the disc skipping - if you tried actually going jogging with one strapped to your shell suit waistband, you might as well not bother. This was inevitable in a format that required a laser consistently tracking a groove only microns wide, on a disc spinning at hundreds of RPM. Later on MiniDiscs claimed to fix this by keeping the disc inside a cool little square cassette, but they still skipped and the two MiniDisc players I owned both died within a couple of years of using them on the move. The grooves on a MiniDisc are even closer together than on a CD, so the physical toll just got the better of them.
These formats all went out the window once MP3 players came along and were able to hold as much as a rucksack-full of tapes or CDs on something even smaller than a tape Walkman, and with no chance of skipping. Cassette tapes died almost immediately, as something came along that offered the convenience of a cassette tape but with immensely improved storage and audio quality. All of a sudden, boxes of cassette tapes were rendered obsolete, and people either threw them out or made interesting artworks out of them.
So I’ve found it amusing that there is a trend amongst young musicians to release their music on tape, as well as the more sensible digital formats and vinyl. I recently discovered this song by Artemas because it’s the soundtrack to a thousand Instagram reels, and it’s an absolute bop:
On his website you can buy his album Pretty on red cassette tape. I guess it’s nice having a physical format in this overly-virtualised world, but cassette? Who even has a tape deck any more?
Artemas definitely isn’t old enough to remember a time when cassette tapes existed for a reason, so this decision is purely aesthetic. The aesthetic of the opaque red tape shell actually reminds me of the tapes I used to have with children’s bedtime stories on them, but there’s no way that’s an intentional or universal mental association.
Going back to cassette tapes feels a bit like going back to floppy disks, or print newspapers. I like the idea of a boutique software company sending you their software on 2,000 floppy disks, and then another 700 floppy disks every time there’s an update, just to be ‘retro’.
Good for Artemas, anyway. Who cares about me and my ‘kids these days’ grumblings? That song’s heavy, and deserves to be all over social media. There’s absolutely no way of putting social media on tape, though.
I used to tape some of the Top 40 on BBC Radio 1 every Sunday, a practice that makes absolutely no sense in the modern world.