Vintage sells . At least that ’s what the media industrial complex seems to think . Whether it ’s rebooting television gambling systems from the ' 80s and ' 90s , reviving the corpse ofTotal Request Live(this time without Carson Daly ) or churning out a ostensibly endless regalia of movieremakes , there looks like no raw , good ideas in Hollywood these days . There are only questionable decisions to come back to quondam ideas .
If there ’s a succeeder story in the rush to revival , it’svinyl record . Wax is back in a big fashion , with record gross revenue nearing$1 billiona twelvemonth . Now some folks are hoping the cassettes that nearly made vinyl group extinct can get in on the action mechanism .
Music studios are put outcassette tapesfrom artists as varied as Lana Del Rey , Arcade Fire and Rick Ross . They are also re - releasing cassette rendering of classic album by everyone from Bob Marley and Nirvana to Ice Cube . OK , maybeUrban Outfittersdoesn’t have the same ethnical cache that it once did , but the chain’sembrace of the tapemeans the cassette could have new legs .
Cassette sales skyrocket by74 percentlast year , thanks in part to hard showing from Prince and Eminem reprint combined with novel album from Justin Bieber and The Weeknd . But before you go diving into the press or under your bottom to dig up all those old tapes , keep in mind that listener bought a aggregate of 129,000 cassette last year , barely a pip on the microwave radar when liken to the 13.1 million vinyl records ( and the 200.8 million albums ) sell in 2016 . The biggest audio taping vender of last yr was " Guardians of the Galaxy Awesome Mix : Volume 1 , " which sell 4,000 copies . ( Cassettes feature heavy in the movie . )
But why would anyone desire to buy a cassette tape ? It ’s never gotten love from audiophiles the way vinyl radical has . Nostalgia is one reason . Another ? The managing director of Anticon Records , Shaun Koplow , says cassettes force you to relax . " Cassette tapes demand that you ’re patient . You ’re not going to be skipping tracks as you would on your phone , " hetold the Wall Street Journal . Plus , how else will you create an honest - to - good mixtape ?
It ’s safe to say that tapes are not going to dominate the music industry anytime soon . They could , however , geld into vinyl radical ’s bottom line . Cassettes are a bunch cheaper to make than record .
