BLOG: Is There A Place For The Humble Cassette In 2013?

By Tom Aylott

It’s a funny old thing, progress. In 2013, we can simultaneously marvel at how little people are prepared to pay for an album of music delivered electronically, but also how people justify spending good money on purchasing music in a format that – by all accounts – should be long resigned to the bin.

Cassette Tapes and home taping didn’t kill the music industry (neither did sheet music and neither will digital piracy), but my main problem with tapes is that I’ve long been a fan of the practical end of ingesting sensory stimuli and something you had to fix with a fucking pencil just seems old fashioned to me. Imagine telling a 13 year old with an iPhone that you often had to blow on a cartridge to make a video game work (I’d still definitely buy a Sega Megadrive though), think about how silly that is.

I had tapes growing up. They were largely bad quality plastic and felt overpriced because of the degrading sound quality. The art of rewinding them was painful and the introduction of the CD felt long, long overdue, just as the introduction of the portable mp3 player did a few years later. Still, recording off the radio was pretty sweet, and who didn’t like a good mix tape?

That people have stuck with vinyl is unsurprising. The 12″ format itself has something gorgeous about it – the artwork fills your eyes in a way a CD never could, and it just feels nicer to put a record on (without even getting onto sound quality). That’s what always got me about the tape thing… tapes are SMALLER than CDs, they sound WORSE than mp3s and do you really want to be seen walking around with a walkman? That is basically the musical equivalent of riding a penny farthing around Hoxton Square twiddling your moustache.

Then there’s the forthcoming Cassette Store Day on September 07. Record Store Day at least seemed to make sense as “Record Stores” actually exist, making up a large portion of the UK vinyl market. What’s a Cassette Store exactly? Nothing. It’s not even a real thing. What is the UK cassette store market? Probably fuck all. So what’s the point? Why is this revival happening? Why now? Is it a cash in? What’s even happening?

For me, the answer lies deeper than quality or format size. Vinyl has flourished as a format despite listening habits moving away from the physical, but the fact that a download is often usually supplied with the vinyl speaks volumes for how often the Joe Purchaser intends to play the record itself. And that’s fine really, isn’t it? Who doesn’t love having a music collection that friends can marvel at while they flip through it? There’s nothing wrong with having a physical embodiment of your connection to the scene and your love for music. At all.

The CD never really felt like that. They felt like the physical embodiment of “The Man” in way – I’d wager you accrued a collection of CDs because that was the only way to actually hear the bands you wanted to hear when you bought them, regardless of the price. While HMV ran rampant with CD prices and we sucked up the import prices before the internet blew a hole in the prices, vinyl remained a premium product for “true music fans”, subsequently going through a well documented revival when CD sales started sliding with the advent of Mp3 players and iTunes. Later, things like Record Store Day celebrated how well independent labels were performing with the format. It was amazing to see releases of new and old music done in an affordable way that actually benefited the stores and put rare records in the hands of the collectors that wanted them. Supply and demand 101 there, really.

Since its inception, Record Store Day has become more popular and features “bigger” releases each year, and though I have absolutely no objections to it as it goes (quite the opposite), I can empathises that some more cynical than I might feel the balance between revenue generation and outright celebration is under threat of tipping a little. Couple that with the fact that you often can’t buy a record without it being some sort of “orange and pink splattered gatefold test press” or something, and you can maybe understand a paradigm shift towards championing another, simpler format. So, what format might you choose as an alternative then? Not CDs (see above). Not mini disks (expensive). That leaves the humble cassette as the old friend we want to catch up with.

And why not? They’re kinda cool in an old model car sort of way. A different form of artwork and a different way to support your favourite band… regardless of whether you listen to it or not. I’m still yet to find a “Cassette Store” per se so I find the whole name of ‘Cassette Store Day’ a little silly, but there are plenty of stores stocking cassettes and I can’t really think of a better name myself, so I end back up at “each to their own” every time. If the money goes back to the bands to keep doing what they’re doing, then who am I to really care? I’d be very surprised to see tapes challenge vinyl any time soon in volume of sales, but as a “thing” it’s probably not worth getting too “wound up” about. I’ve also just realised that I’m wearing a T Shirt with a very large cassette on the front so I’ll probably just leave this here and have a lie down.

TOM AYLOTT