Cassettes still selling?
LokoOne
1,823 Posts
Intresting article I just read. Ive seen dudes selling old tapes on ebay, didnt know dudes where still releasing shit on them. We're still clinging to the cassette (from smh.com.au)Darren Levin May 7, 2009Lovers of retro and modern music believe there's life in the medium yet, Darren Levin reports.PUTTING an album out on cassette in 2009 might be tantamount to releasing a video straight to VHS, but Melbourne musician Adam Camilleri insists there's life in the medium yet.In an age of iPods and MP3s, Camilleri's band, Electric Jellyfish, released its latest EP, The Woods, exclusively on cassette. It sold out within a few months."Many people were excited by the music being on tape," he says. "There were certainly people who were confused by it being on tape, too. They'd tell us they don't even own a boombox any more."Accounting for more than 50per cent of global music sales in the mid-1980s, cassettes were quickly cast aside with the advent of CDs. But they've gradually been popping up on merchandise tables at local gigs and in independent record stores such as Missing Link in Melbourne's CBD.Part of the reason is cost. Arun of 100 cassettes costs about $2 per unit (about the same price as a CD), while 100 30-centimetre vinyl records will set you back just over $5 each."For underground music, vinyl will always be the preferred medium, but cassette is definitely a more affordable analog format," Camilleri says.Mark Groves, from Melbourne noise outfit True Radical Miracle, is another tape devotee. He considers the medium a true symbol of the underground music scene."(Cassettes) passed into redundancy within pop culture and the music industry at large over a decade ago, but have remained in use by all kinds of 'buried' networks," he says, pointing to their popularity in the underground noise and metal scenes.While cassettes are often derided for their audio deficiencies - they are prone to dropouts and hiss - Groves considers these perceived flaws part of their charm. The band's debut EP, Taste the Rainbow, was re-released on CD after the cassette run sold out."People were pleased they were able to play the release in the cassette decks of their old-model cars," Groves says.Similarly, Melbourne label Mistletone decided to put out Kes Band's self-titled album on cassette because frontman Karl Scullin wanted to hear it in his car."He (Scullin) drives around in a beautiful old Volvo listening to car tapes all the time, and he really liked the idea of having his music on cassette," label manager Sophie Best says. "To be honest, we haven't sold that many. But they look awesome on the merch desk."Still, Best hasn't ruled out more cassette releases in the future. She says the format has broad nostalgic appeal."Apparently, cassette Walkmans are in with the hipsters, and I think oldies will always have a few tapes rattling around in their glovebox."As director of Dex Audio, believed to be Australia's only cassette manufacturing plant, Greg Williams has witnessed the cassette's rise and fall first hand. Dex started manufacturing tapes in 1982, but it wasn't until the mid-to-late '80s that things really started to take off."By 1987, we were doing around 400,000 a month. I don't know where they all went, but people were just chewing them up," Williams says.Now, cassettes are only a small part of Williams' business, which focuses on CD and DVD replication and duplication."What used to take up the factory now takes up the corner," he says.There's still the occasional request for cassettes, Williams says, mainly from bands eager to recapture their youth, but also from businesses that prefer the medium for dictation.Ironically, while the cassette's death knell may be sounding, Williams says its audio kinks have been ironed out."We reinvested and replaced the reel-to-reel system with a digital system. It makes quite a difference ... You get the character of tape without all the noise and defects."And, with the release of the Alesis TapeLink ($US299, $A410 RRP) in the US in January, there might be hope for those boxes of old mix tapes just yet. Essentially a cassette player with a USB plug, the product enables users to transfer their collection onto their PC or Mac. It even comes with audio cleaning and noise-reduction software.What happened in AustraliaWHILE ARIA doesn't keep a record of cassette figures, chart historian David Kent believes they were first available in Australia as early as the late 1960s."Only small quantities of imports were available at the time," he recalls. "Local manufacture began in the early 1970s, and by 1972 most big sellers (or potential big sellers) were released on LP and cassette."The cassette, which cost about the same as vinyl upon its release, became the format of choice for Australians because of its portability, and cassette players rapidly became a fixture in new cars. With the emergence of the CD in the 1990s, however, its days were numbered."It didn't take long for CDs to take the place of cassettes," Kent explains. "They offered all the portability benefits, the only negative being the cost in the early days."
Comments
That being said, tapes are crap.
This coming from someone who still has tapes in his car.
The only benefit to tapes is I can beat the shit out of them much more than I can a CD floating around on the floor of my car.
Let us recall crinkled, folded-over cassette tape spilling out of the case that must be manually wound back with a pencil, only to either find that it is so crinkled a 5 second section never plays right again, OR the tape was flipped over somewhere, you didn't notice, wound it back, and you have whole songs that play muffled, in reverse.
no matter how much of a "vinyl revival" there may be.
All the hip kids I work with that are in bands are all about
recording to cassette, and at my radio station we keep getting
CD-R's from bands to play on the radio where the actual "official"
release is only available on cassette.
Hence the question mark in my subject heading...
Im not gettin rid of none of my tapes.
'ironman', charley patton & brian eno are not enough
comptons most wanted, 'meat is murder' & prince 1999 I had to banish as not being worth repeast listens
there was a period in the '80s, before everybody switched over to CD's, when cassettes threatened to take over the market from vinyl. i'm glad it didn't!
tapes are okay as a secondary thing, but as a vinyl/CD substitute?? my God, any format where you can't choose the song you want to listen to is just flat-out WEAK. "wow, I wanna hear the third song on side two!" - and then you gotta fast forward or back up to the song in question. no, the cassette is not something i can feel nostalgic about.
The new mandatory packaging concept is to put duct tape on the case and write the title on that.
I was thinking about this the other day. how not being able to select songs on tapes created a different listening experience, almost a capitive audience, where you 'had' to listen to songs and some times those songs you didnt first like grew on you, where as with cd/mp3 its quite easy to miss alot of music due to being so easy to skip thru. (not sure if Im expressing this too well...)
But even the expereicne of listening to a WHOLE album start to finish over and over (like Death Certificate...which didnt leave my walkman for 6 mth straight). I havent done that in ages, occasionally when you only have the same cd in the car, I might play something on repeat but its easy to skip thru the songs.
Which is why I love them hour long MP3 mixes...cus its similar feeling, you have to listen to the sum of all parts so to speak, rather than pick and choose - cus sometimes your tastes are biased and you end up sleeping on dopeness.
Used stores around here more or less quit selling tapes probably 5 or so years ago. I know one local chain just started dumping them for like 10 cents each.
I mean CDs and vinyl is a fairly speedy thing once you have a master, but can you imagine 800 tape recording machines ?
Even with super duper high speed dubbing, this must have been a biiiatch.
I thought exactly the same. My iPod broke last year, so I recorded some new tapes and went back to the walkman. It made me realize a LOT about songs I "kind of" liked I had not noticed before and vice versa.
The fast-forwarding thing might be annoying, but its seriously not THAT terrible. Like dude said, don't we all listen to hour-long mp3 mixes at 128k?
The bulk of my funk and jazz library is still on tape, I hated CDs in the early days (and still do for many reasons) and have tape recordings that sound much better than modern remastered CD editions.
Of course, I have to watch that they dont get put near any speakers and there are some prerecorded tapes (from the same offending groups of labels/distributors) that sounded bad back in the day and sound unlistenable now, but my own recordings I think I'll cherish til I die.
Tapes will continue to outsell and be used by more people worldwide than anything else, bearing in mind how music is distributed in Asian and African countries. And long my it be so.
Tapes rock.
I also have fond memories getting the recording lined up riiiiight at the start of the dark tape by manually winding it forward with a pen like some kinda super tape savvy technician
Is a compressed file any better?
It seems the general public doesnt seem to care about "sound quality".
"The low speed of the cassette makes it possible to duplicate cassette tape at speeds orders of magnitude greater than the playback speed"
"The typical procedure was to record a master at, say 7.5 in./s using Dolby B-type prerecord noise reduction. The master was then reproduced at up to 64 times the normal speed"
It seems that the old white gospel fans prefers tapes because we get a call about once a month from old white people looking for old white gospel on cassette.
I personally hate tapes and regret that most of my 80s metal collection was on cassette. When I was 12/13 thats mainly what I bought..sigh.
Hmmm, I guess it is warm like playing a record so I should retract the dumb quote. I'm biased. Much like Hook Up, I regret buying so many tapes that I wish I had on another format. So it goes...
And that's exactly why its cool to them - its anachronistic, it doesn't make any sense. Their parents and their little sisters don't play tapes so think its crazy and their own little scene (which I guess it now is).
Fortunately most of that stuff is noise anyway so nobody will miss it when the tapes rot away...
Check out this all casette deck studio: http://www.myspace.com/casacassette
I was literally transported to when I was 5 year olds listening to Disney bedtime stories in my walkman. Or back to all the mixtapes I dubbed to cassette in High school.
I love casettes after I'm done with this album. I might do a solo project to a 4 track casette deck.
- spidey
I kept boxes and boxes of tapes for many years and moves until I threw out the majority of them last year, mostly major label stuff that I could easily buy used on CD or download if I really want to hear it. It pained me to toss 4-500 hundred tapes in the trash but I hadn't listened to one since I got my first iPod. I did hang on to most of the rap stuff with the plan to throw it on ebay as a lot, but I'm too lazy to be bothered so far.