The Cassette Tape comes back

with industry Pro, Nick Batzdorf

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superblonde
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The Cassette Tape comes back

Post by superblonde » Wed May 12, 2021 7:23 pm

Stats no hype.
Cassette tape sales growth is up 100%+ year over year.
However cassette sales account for less than 1% of total sales.
Current duplication cost (qty 100) is ~$3.00 each (case & card cover extra).


"According to British Phonographic Industry figures, 156,542 cassettes were sold in the UK last year, the highest figure since 2003 and an increase of 94.7% on 2019 sales. Seemingly out of the blue, global pop icons such as Lady Gaga, the 1975, and Dua Lipa have started rushing out their new releases on cassette – and they’re selling out."


"With an increase of 130% since the 2016 holiday season, a total of 26,699 cassette tapes were sold during the 2017 holiday season. According to media metrics firm BuzzAngle, cassette tape sales are up 136.1% from 2016 to 2017. According to Nielsen Music, 2017 saw the sale of 14.3 million vinyl LPs in the US alone. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band accounted for 72,000 of those sales. "


"For Glasgow’s indie and punk bands, as with today’s independent artists, cassettes actually represented a cost-effective means of providing a physical product, far cheaper than pressing a vinyl record and printing sleeves and packaging. As one label owner put it, “we tend to release on tape because it’s cheap to manufacture, it’s easy to recoup, and it leaves money left over for the bands to get something”."

"5SOS’s latest album CALM sold 12,000 cassettes in its first week. This feat makes it the fastest-selling cassette in 18 years."



" The BPI says cassettes have accounted for just 0.2 per cent of album sales in the year to date, versus a much more respectable 12 per cent for vinyl"

"The biggest cassette release in the UK for January to July 2019 is a pop release, Billie Eilish’s debut album When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? with 4,000 sales of the ‘Exclusive Black Cassette.’ Second is Catfish and The Bottlemen’s The Balance, on 3,000 cassette sales, with Madonna’s Madame Xat no.3, Lewis Capaldi’s Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent at four and Hozier’s Wasteland Baby rounding out the top five. Last year’s bestseller was The 1975’s A Brief Enquiry Into Online Relationships which sold 7,523 copies, most in the first week of release."

"Music database and marketplace Discogs found that cassettes made up 6 per cent of releases logged by the community in 2018 with digital on 9 per cent, CDs on 33 per cent and vinyl making up 49 per cent. In 2019, the most popular cassette genres on the platform are rock (27,771), pop (14,310), electronic (12,434) and folk, world and country (10,878) with classical, stage and screen, reggae and even brass and military all making an appearance. "

"Sales in the U.S. grew 23% in 2018, according to Nielsen Music, with 219,000 tapes sold in 2018 compared with 178,000 in 2017, Pitchfork reported. That was after a 35% increase in 2017. In the U.K., sales were up 112% year-on-year in the first half of 2019, even if that means only 36,000 cassettes were sold."

"British company GPO Retro, which makes items ranging from record players to phones, developed an 80s-inspired “Brooklyn boombox” that looks not unlike the one John Cusack holds aloft at the end of cult 80s film Say Anything, after noting strong sales of its shoebox-style tape recorder. GPO’s managing director, Gary Basso said: “We have probably sold around 17,000 units in the past year that incorporated a cassette player, which is about three times as much as the previous year. The people buying them are aged anywhere between 25 and over 60.”

"Cassette Store Day was founded in London by a group of labels in 2013, Blak Hand Records (UK) and Side-B Creations (JP). What happend to Cassette Store Day? Due to the serious allegations surrounding Burger Records, Cassette Store Day (CSD) 2020, has been cancelled. You can see the official statement here from CSD UK https://cassettestoredayuk.com. Cassette Week is run by Tapehead City. https://www.cassetteweek.com Where can i press tapes? We recommend National Audio Company & Duplication.ca for all cassette duplication needs. "

Cassette Week 2020
https://youtu.be/HZ6_7wtF6Cw

“If sharks can have a week, then cassettes should get one too”
— Charlie Tapes
. . . www.superblonde.org "All Kale Seitan! ♭II ‼" -Moshpit Chant of the Vegan Metalhead

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Re: The Cassette Tape comes back

Post by CEMundt » Wed Oct 13, 2021 11:19 pm

God, I hate cassettes.

My day job (or night job… I’m posting this on my smoke break, 2:12AM) is digitizing old analog recordings, and I regularly touch 200+ cassettes a night and listen to about 100 of them. Warble, hiss, buzz, comb-filtering, sticky shed, splices, all that good stuff. Ever drop an open cassette pack? Hope you like spaghetti.

Perhaps an excellent quality Studer reel-to-reel recorder can add some nice saturation, but I am absolutely not in the camp that likes these old analog formats (can you tell?) That being said, quality analog processors are charming, but that’s another topic entirely.

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Re: The Cassette Tape comes back

Post by Cameloide » Thu Oct 14, 2021 9:00 am

Yeah I don't miss cassettes at all. But I do remember being promised a "lifetime of listening" to pristine audio that wouldn't deteriorate like cassettes when they introduced CDs. What a load of shit that was, huh? Now almost none of my 25 year old CDs will play without skipping all over the place, if they play at all. Yet, I managed to digitize all my old high school 4-track tapes from over 25 years ago recently without much incident...aside from a little wobble and hiss here and there. And they'd been stored in all kinds of places (some with no climate control) in Mississippi, one of the most humid and often hot places in the country.

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Re: The Cassette Tape comes back

Post by CEMundt » Thu Oct 14, 2021 5:17 pm

Cameloide wrote:
Thu Oct 14, 2021 9:00 am
Yeah I don't miss cassettes at all. But I do remember being promised a "lifetime of listening" to pristine audio that wouldn't deteriorate like cassettes when they introduced CDs. What a load of shit that was, huh? Now almost none of my 25 year old CDs will play without skipping all over the place, if they play at all. Yet, I managed to digitize all my old high school 4-track tapes from over 25 years ago recently without much incident...aside from a little wobble and hiss here and there. And they'd been stored in all kinds of places (some with no climate control) in Mississippi, one of the most humid and often hot places in the country.
It’s funny that you mention CDs. Just last night, I was ripping CDs (not exactly digitization… but for the same archival purposes), and one of them EXPLODED IN THE DRIVE! This wasn’t the first time, either. Those almost invisible cracks or chips in the plastic hole can be dangerous. Yeah, CDs are not as long-lasting as most of us were led to think.

Other things you start to look for when you are ripping thousands of optical discs: labels that are beginning to separate from the front and will shred in the drive, “disc rot”, a somewhat rare but existent chemical deterioration, and chocolate on the disc (no seriously…) :)

It’s kind of funny, tape media is more reliable in some ways. When tape, even digital tape, is damaged, it is typically either fixable or that part of the content or data can be ignored. An Error Correction Code will usually get you back on track. Of course, that isn’t a hard and fast rule, but I find it to be true. You may hear some rather unpleasant digital errors during playback, but there are ways around it. You won’t seriously damage a player as long as they are cleaned and checked for any debris if a tape breaks or sheds oxide in a deck. Tape can be put in a new shell if that shell is damaged.

But if a disc is physically damaged, especially along the outer or inner rim that contains formatting data, that data is typically lost. Yea, internal scratches can be less serious than they look, and I don’t really look for them when I am working with optical discs (they either run or don’t) but you can’t splice out damaged sectors like you can with tape. The data is not as separated in space as with tape. Recovery software can help in many cases, but as I said, when the disc is damaged, that’s all folks!

Someone who is extremely concerned about their data can only expect a CD-R (or other rewritables like DVD-Rs) to last for 10 years when left to their own. Yes, they usually last longer, but they do deteriorate and more quickly that you would think. Professionally pressed discs are physically punched with pits and don’t use ink like CD-Rs do, so they can last longer, but they are still susceptible to UV and other issues like humidity, just like tape.

Another issue that crops up with optical discs is jitter. Rerunning the disc can usually improve upon it, but it can be subtle and difficult to find in a 60-minute recording without specialized detection software.

Of course, tape is more precarious around magnetic fields that optical discs. Ultimately, there is no format that I am aware of that can be left in a box for 60 years without danger.

Wait… what about that copper phonograph, the so called “Golden Record”, that they sent out on the Voyager spacecraft?

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Re: The Cassette Tape comes back

Post by Merryband1 » Thu Oct 14, 2021 7:45 pm

It was copper? I guess they figured that without air and humidity, there would be no verdigris? Statue of Liberty. Just saying...

Merry
PS I still have some blank cassettes (somewhere) that a recording artist friend who was moving more into CD & digital gave me. Of course, I don't have a good machine on which to produce anything, alas... Still... I find it interesting how the younger generation is returning to the earlier days of the recording industry's output. I wonder how long till they want wax cylinders again. :D

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Re: The Cassette Tape comes back

Post by CEMundt » Mon Nov 08, 2021 4:39 am

I have to admit, recording to wax sounds fun.

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