Thousands More Cassettes Are Being Sold Each Year. Why Now?

When Emily Pitcairn, 22, started to host shows on her roof in Bushwick, she noticed a surprising addition to merch tables. Between the expensive, limited quantities of vinyl records and t-shirts, bands of all kinds were releasing their music on cassettes again.

“I thought it was pretty weird that all these were starting to drop tapes,” said Pitcarin, 22, who now has a cassette collection of her own. “Nostalgia is profitable, because it appeals to an older generation who grew up on it, and then a younger generation who loves to claim that they were born in the wrong generation. But whenever bands are selling tapes at merch tables, I’m definitely more prone to get a tape rather than a vinyl or a CD.”

Music lovers like Pitcairn have helped drive a steady rise in cassette sales throughout the late 2010s and early 2020s. Tapes represent a mere fraction-of-a-percentage of all music consumed in the last year, down from 1984 when they accounted for 53% of all albums formats produced. But in 2022 alone, tapes had a 28% increase in sales, totalling 440,000 units sold according to one report. But as marquee names like Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, and Bad Bunny begin to sell their blockbuster albums in cassette form, New York City musicians, music obsessives, and small tape record labels have been preserving the legacy of tapes as both a cheap and accessible way to consume music for years.

Ben Mancell, 48, has run the Fuzzy Warbles Cassettes record label since 2018 initially to have an outlet for music by him and his friends. But Mancell settled on tapes because of frustrations with the alternative forms of physical media, he said. Compared to the expenses that come with vinyl records — the most popular physical mode of listening to music nowadays, recently surpassing CDs — the accessibility of cassette tapes is one of their largest appeals.

“The long wait and high cost associated with pressing vinyl was the impetus for starting a cassette label. It was an accessible way to have control over production,” said Mancell, who produces the cassettes for Fuzzy Warbles at home. “The rising popularity almost feels like a resurgence of cassette culture in the early 1980s.”

While some vinyl fans have decamped to the tape world, many music lovers have come to tapes for other reasons. In her recent book, Mixtape Nostalgia, Point Park University professor Jehnie Burns captures the value of making a mixtape for someone and the storied relationships it has with cassette culture. In an age of music on demand, Burns said that a tape requires an intentionality that is rare in the way we think about music.

“For a lot of people, it’s that emotional attention to detail and physicality. You’re not just like, ‘I made you a Spotify playlist, it took me 15 minutes,’ but it’s that you spend the time and the energy to create a [physical mixtape tape],” said Burns. “There’s something about the features of the cassette: that analog sound, the fact that you can’t skip around, that you have to listen to it in order.”

For both Burns and Pitcairn, their love of cassettes comes from remembering a time when music had to be played through a physical medium. But Mixtape Nostalgia highlights another source of new cassette fans: recent movies, TV shows, and other pop culture where mixtapes and cassettes are central, from Guardians of the Galaxy to High Fidelity.

Tess Restraino, an New York University Gallatin student and cassette lover, says that the cassette craze isn’t about half-remembered nostalgia but something far simpler.

“I know so many kids who got into cassettes because they saw a tape recorder on 13 Reasons Why. I think I know at least five,” said Restraino. “I want to say that there was some profound reason for why kids got into tapes, maybe that they felt lonely in the digital sphere. But I’m not sure that’s what it was.”

This upticks in sales hasn’t just been found at the DIY shows that Pitcairn organizes or on the online forums that Burns researched when writing “Mixtape Nostalgia.” Iconic New York record stores like Generation Records and Academy Records have carried tapes for years. But it’s just as easy to find tapes new and old at more specialized shops like Brooklyn’s Material World or the East Village’s Limited to One.

While cassettes are starting to appear at those trendy record stores or in people’s love languages via handmade mixtapes, the most frequent location for them to be found is still small shows. Since Pitcairn noticed tapes at gigs, there’s been no signs of it slowing down. Pitcairn said that she would love to press some for her band, hiFi, in the near future.

“With humans in general, we love stuff that we can hold in our hands, something tactile, right?,” said Pitcairn. “We’ve been in an age of streaming for a while. There’s something so intentional and special about getting a tape and having the means to play it.”