Dust off your 'parrot', the cassette is coming back

Maybe a whole new generation learns to unscrew the tape with a pen!

Finding a song on the music cassettes is tedious, they end up breaking when we use them too much, their sound quality is not very good and despite all that in recent months there are signs that they are coming back. This revival is a very peculiar phenomenon, because although the vinyl records live a new youth their return is explained much better than that of the old tapes.

The 'noise' of the music cassette sounds again.
The format characterized by its 'dirty' sound is back in fashion thanks to new releases and reissues of classics.

After the vinyl, the cassette tapes - the classic among the classics for those who are over 30 years old - are again gaining importance in the music industry. Sales of that format in the United States grew by 74% (129,000 copies sold) in 2016 compared to the previous year (74,000 copies), according to Nielsen Music's annual report. Although the cassettes have never completely disappeared, they had lost popularity after they dominated the market in the US and accounted for around 40% in Spain between the 80s and 90s.

This format, characterized by its dirty sound, has been resurrected due to releases like Justin Bieber's Purpose and The Weeknd's Beauty Behind the Madness (both exclusively sold by Urban Outfitters), which sold 1,000 copies each last year , along with reissues of classics like The Slim Shady LP, by Eminen (3,000 tapes sold) and Purple Rain, by Prince (2,000 copies). Ironically, most new cassettes come with a code to download the album in digital format, since many consumers do not have a player. But even that is in the process of being solved: a team of designers Lithuania intends to sell next year a new walkman model similar to current gadgets to solve this problem.

The secret behind this renewed success may lie in what has traditionally been the weak point of the tapes: the noise produced when passing through the rollers.
The nostalgic associated with vintage or retro products is another factor that explains the popularity of analog music in the century of Spotify.

There are also economic causes for the return of the cassette. It is much cheaper to edit a tape than a vinyl record. The cassettes are perfect for artists who do not have too much money and want to publish music in an analog format. But perhaps the main reason why the films are back is that it is difficult to resist such an icon of pop culture.

In the newly opened space opera Guardians of the Galaxy for example, homage is paid to the old cassette. In fact, the disc in which many of the songs that appear in the film are compiled mimics a mixtape, a direct antecedent of the playlists, and is having a tremendous success. It is even said that it can appear edited in this old format.

There are also plastic artists like Eduardo Balanza whose works tend to revolve around the universe of these magnetic supports. The covers made manually for the homemade mixtapes, the direct antecedent of the playlist, also received their tribute in the book Gracias por la música.

#tammywhite