As cassettes come back, the dilemma is finding a tape deck

By Marc Hogan

When Taylor Swift released “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” in an array of physical formats last year, Cora Buel knew she had to get the cassette right away. Buel, 48, who is based in Daly City, California, is a fan of Swift’s music — an affinity she shares with her teenage daughter, who has since bought her mother more tapes as gifts. One main reason? Buel drives a 1998 BMW Z3, and has no other convenient options for on-the-road album playback.

“Just get an old car that only plays cassettes,” Buel said, “and you’ll listen every day.” Although Buel might be an extreme proponent of retro design — she works as chief revenue officer at ThredUp, an online consignment store — the cassette’s return is by now almost as unmistakable as the format’s distinctive hiss and warble.

Dominant in the United States from the early 1980s until it was overtaken commercially by the compact disc in the early 1990s, the cassette tape has survived as an underground phenomenon, a deliberately anachronistic medium of choice for artists on the noise, avant-garde and low-fi fringes. But tapes began turning up at the trend-chasing retailer Urban Outfitters as long ago as 2015, the same year that digital streaming first overtook download sales. Nearly a decade later, Swift’s latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” stands as the top-selling cassette of the year so far, with about 23,000 copies sold through June 30, according to the tracking service Luminate.

Sure, cassette sales of Swift’s new album pale beside its performance in even other physical formats, where it boasts sales of 1.1 million copies on CD and another 988,000 on vinyl. But “Tortured Poets” alone is on pace to beat the total annual sales of all albums on cassette for as recently as 2009, when the Luminate precursor Nielsen SoundScan reported a mere 34,000 units shipped. If Spotify killed the iTunes star, and vinyl is increasingly a high-priced luxury item — never mind CDs for the moment — then cassettes could be the cockroaches that outlive them all.

As labels look to capitalise on “superfans” who will buy multiple formats, artists releasing new music on cassette this year cross genres and generations. A sampling of musicians embracing the format includes: the pop polymath Charli XCX, the alternative-rock titan Kim Deal, the adventurous South Florida rapper Denzel Curry, the outré Thom Yorke band the Smile, the black-metal group Darkthrone, the pop-rock duo Twenty One Pilots, the meditative electronic producer Tycho, the masked country singer Orville Peck, the folk-pop troubadour Shawn Mendes, the reigning pop wunderkind Billie Eilish, the garage-rocker Ty Segall, the alt-pop eclecticist Remi Wolf and the singer-songwriter Omar Apollo.

Though the last new car to be factory-equipped with a cassette deck was reportedly a 2010 Lexus, more than a quarter of light-duty vehicles on the road are at least 15 years old, according to a recent analysis by S&P Global Mobility.

Sony sold more than 200 million Walkmans from July 1979, when the devices debuted in Japan, until the music stopped around 2010. Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba and Bose no longer sell audio tape players, representatives for each of the four companies confirmed. The Consumer Technology Association, a trade group, stopped tracking sales of combination radio/cassette/CD players in 2016, when there were an estimated 653,671 units shipped, compared with a likely peak of around 25 million radio/cassette combos in 1994, according to a spokesperson.

Although the market for new cassette players became too small to bother measuring, a vast supply of the ostensibly obsolete gadgets was already in existence, in various states of repair, waiting to be rediscovered.

Liam Dwyer, the 20-year-old general director of WXBC, the student-run radio station at Bard College, originally got into tapes because an older Volkswagen that belonged to Dwyer’s father had a cassette deck in it. While there’s a tape deck at the station, Dwyer (who uses they/them pronouns) recently found a cassette player at school that someone was giving away — a Technics, model unknown. “I haven’t tested it yet, but I believe that it will work, or I will fix it up,” they said.

Dwyer has been looking into acquiring a Walkman for portable use, partly because of an interest in how artists like Liz Harris, aka Grouper, incorporate tapes into sound art and instrumental music. The first tapes Dwyer picked up were by Golden Boy, a “breakcore” artist from their own hometown, Portland, Oregon, and the music that Dwyer listens to on cassette is mainly electronic and experimental. A double cassette from Frank Ocean associate Vegyn was a staple in the Volkswagen, but “the car, unfortunately, had to be towed.” If cassettes are popular, it’s in part because they are cheap for do-it-yourself artists and independent labels to get made. For one recent title on Jack White’s Third Man Records, cassettes cost $2.80 apiece to produce versus $6.92 per vinyl LP, Ben Blackwell, one of the label’s founders, said. Tape enthusiasts’ preferences in playback devices can be similarly economical.

Some new manufacturers have entered the cassette market, meeting a simmering demand but confronting a vastly different supply-side landscape than in the 1990s. FiiO, an electronics company with headquarters in Guangzhou, China, recently debuted a bare-bones, Walkman-style cassette player that sells for about $100. “The biggest challenge has been the near-complete disruption of the cassette player supply chain,” the company’s CEO, James Chung, said in an e-mailed statement. “Restoring the technical prowess of 1990s Walkman devices is virtually impossible today.” Then again, vinyl record production has largely overcome a similar supply squeeze in the past decade.

A Paris-based start-up called We Are Rewind introduced its own minimalist, Walkman-like tape player via Kickstarter in 2020, citing inspiration from the timeworn cassette deck at the heart of the “Guardians of the Galaxy” film franchise, as well as from the 1980s-retro Netflix smash series “Stranger Things". Retailing for about $160 and up, We Are Rewind’s portable tape machines also offer Bluetooth connectivity for wireless listening.