Last year, on the 40th anniversary of the Sony Walkman, I raised the question of who was actually buying these tapes (Going walkabout: 40 years of the Walkman), with Billie Eilish selling 4,000 copies of her debut album When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? in the format, and the The 1975's A Brief Enquiry Into Online Relationships becoming 2018’s cassette best-seller, both suggesting, bizarrely, that tapes had a teenage demographic. Quite what such youths were playing these tapes on remains a mystery, but then according to the BPI, the body representing the UK’s record labels, a fifth of people who buy vinyl records don’t have anything to play them on.
Regardless of such practicalities, new figures from the Official Charts Company have revealed that 65,000 cassette albums were bought in the UK in the first six months of this year - twice as many as in the same period last year - and that by the end of 2020, more than 100,000 copies will have been sold. This remains a fraction of the total number of albums sold via all formats, but still. Growth in cassettes is faster than any other category.
So, why? "Younger consumers are buying into their collectible appeal — as they have done with vinyl," the BPI's Gennaro Castaldo explained to The Times yesterday. "They are also drawn to the retro Eighties appeal, which artists such as Dua Lipa, the 1975 and the Weeknd have recently spoken about as an influence on their music." Artists marketing limited edition cassette releases is a cute measure, given that the age group most likely to buy them are also buying quirky retro things like skateboards and Converse All Stars. Perhaps we have Guardians Of The Galaxy to blame, after Chris Pratt's character played a mixtape throughout the film, a feature cleverly reflected in the movie's marketing (which included releasing the soundtrack on tape). It may have started a trend.
Old heads like me, however, have a different view. For a start, they were cheaper than vinyl albums. Secondly, a cassette was never more than a carrier, and not a particularly good one at that, especially when it got trapped in the player's mechanism. A feature of hedges and grass verges since the cassette died out is that they are no longer strewn with reels of magnetic tape ejected from car windows in frustration (you could also note that you don't see discarded porn magazines any more, thanks to the Internet, but I digress). Indeed, all the cassette had going for it was its size, and even then, going on holiday meant taking with you a bulky plastic carrying case stuffed with your tape collection (both those you’d bought from Our Price and…ahem…those containing albums you’d recorded off your brother's collection or Radio 1).
The cassette was purely about cheap convenience. Even with the addition of "Dobly" noise reduction on both the tapes and the players, they were never about hifi enjoyment. The vinyl revival, on the other hand, has been mostly about the fetishism of "real" audio quality, and that view will get defended - with some justification - by audiophiles until the cows come home. Even if such benefits are marginal, there is something about the entire vinyl experience - from eyes to ears - that the cassette can and will never replicate. And, yes, the aesthetic appeal is a part of it. From Unknown Pleasures to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, there is no shortage of 12x12-inch cardboard art with infinite Instagram appeal. I even recently bought a dedicated rack bearing the words “Now Playing” purely for the pose benefit. Cassettes, though, hold no such value and the 10cm-by-7cm box offers nothing to display even the most notable imagery, leaving me still bewildered by what kitsch attraction they hold.
And, yet, the surge in demand - fuelled largely by the limited edition releases - has even led to US and European factories reopening manufacturing lines for high-grade ferric oxide, a key ingredient in magnetic tape, a similar story to the reopening of vinyl pressing plants. If this is, then, being driven by a generation of teenagers more aware of the environment than any that has come before, it seems counter-intuitive that they should be buying a combination of plastic and chemicals purely to put on display (again, assuming that none of them own any kind of cassette player).
However, while the story about cassettes coming back provides a platform for venerable geezers like me (who, incidentally, spent 17 years of his career shilling shiny new digital formats for Philips) to harrumph about youngsters and their bizarre trends, the cassette and even my beloved vinyl are spots in the ocean compared with streamed music. Lewis Capaldi’s Someone You Loved, 2019’s biggest selling hit, has been streamed 228 million times. The cassette has a long way to go, and like most fads, will be superseded by something else quite quickly.
No comments:
Post a Comment