Maybe OT, but i remember the "power of tape" when i was 10 in 1987, when an italian public radio broadcasted a full videogame (compressed by "turbo loader") every day and it was possible to record and play it on that beautiful commodore 64!
I am glad to be done with cassette tapes. I never liked the hissiness, and the rewinding. I'm tired of car stereos eating the tapes. I'm sick of the 5 tapes in my car that got listened to over and over. My boxes of tapes went in the garbage 10 years ago.<p>My current car stereo I bought for $75 has only a USB port, and I stuck a 32G thumb drive in it with gawd knows how many tunes are on it. Mucho better. I enjoy inflicting disco music on anyone who dares to ride with me.
Having grown up with tapes... I just don't understand the appeal. After obtaining one of the early cdrom based boomboxes for the first time, I was perfectly happy to replace my tapes with cd. Sure, there was zero buffering and even the slightest bump caused a skip... But the sound was great!<p>But hey, why not. :)
I make arrowheads for my DIY bow from bottle glass and stone because I want to know how it was like hunting thousands of years ago.<p>I see little children having curiosity about those "cassetes" thing, but it is a five minutes thing. I actually lived casettes and HATE them. I sold all my collection, burned the piece of furniture that held it in a night of San Juan fire.<p>Great memories (the fire and the party on the beach, it became useful after all).<p>Now with just Garageband and audacity I could do 100 times more that I could do with cassetes and hold thousands of times more recordings and songs without the nonsense analog noise in my pocket.<p>I couldn't help when I read PR like this to think that someone else needs to find "a bigger sucker" in order to get rid of their cassete junk in their parent's garage or something and make a profit out of it.<p>In 2015 CDs sell for as much as $15? Wow, it is not like people could connect to youtube, download any song of the world with youtuve-dl with better quality that cassete could ever dream about. And better talk about even more outdated tech like vinyl without talking about itunes or dozens of music web sites and social networks as alternatives for "music lovers" so the article does not sound as the piece of PR it is.
The attraction to mix-tapes for me was the artwork. They had this "college band" vibe to them, where someone had cut out art from a magazine, or maybe drew something in pen & ink, then used transfer letters to put a title on it, and ran it through a photocopier until it had a street grunge to it, and looked like something you didn't want your parents to know you had.
I would like to see MiniDisc get the same attention. Guess that'll never happen again as it was always a bit niche while tape was as mainstream as it can get. Ok it's digital and somewhat more expensive but apart from that it imo is very similar (easy to record, share, portable) yet has much advantages over tape (noise, portables last way longer, medium does not lose signal under normal circumstances, less mechanical parts, higher density in same form factor)
Reel to reel at 7 ips was quite good. I remember my dad's Akai player from the 50s even supported quadraphonic. Too bad this isn't catching on..
People are clearly choosing tape for the same reason as vinyl: a desire for <i>embodiment</i> of the music. With digital music, no one piece is more present than any other. Everything is equally close, and therefore equally emotionally distant.
I thought it'd be about software tapes, but I'm not surprised - vinyl records are even older and more fragile in many ways, and yet there's still plenty of interest in them, so why not cassette tape.
1980s? Philips cassettes were widespread long before the 1980s. The first one I had was in 1972 and it was a long way from the earliest. Philips launched the system in 1963.