A version of this story first appeared in Gear Patrol Magazine. Subscribe today for more stories like this one, plus receive a $15 gift card to the Gear Patrol Store.
Everything old is new again, and has been for a minute. The staggering resurgence of vinyl, with sales increasing every year since 2006 to a peak of 27.5 million LPs sold in the United States in 2020, is so cemented that it hardly seems fair to describe it merely as a “trend.” Now the humble cassette tape is starting to see a renaissance, drafting in vinyl’s enormous wake.
Sales of cassette tapes in the U.S. have increased by double digit percentages in recent years, according to Nielson reports, and now number in the six figures annually. Though still peanuts compared to vinyl, it’s a marked upswing. And the cassette tape’s comeback is shaping up to be as different as the two formats are.
Photo by Henry Phillips for Gear PatrolWhen the cassette came to prominence in the ’70s and ’80s, it was as much about function as it was about sound. The practical alternatives of the time, reel-to-reel and vinyl, were expensive and bulky where cassettes were affordable, portable and quickly ubiquitous thanks in large part to the invention of the boom box in 1966 and the iconic Sony Walkman in 1979.
But the cassette was doomed to be crushed by what was essentially a better version of itself. CDs were just about as cheap and mobile, with no need to flip or rewind. Even though tape technology eventually grew to match CDs in sound quality, the damage was done. By 2000, cassettes made up less than 5 percent of the market, and the iPod was on the horizon. Barely anybody was buying, selling, making or listening to tapes, much less doing it on principle.
