If studying cassettes has taught us anything, it’s that nostalgia is nimble. We’ve had the privilege of authoring two distinct studies of the premillennial history (Rob) and postmillennial survival (Ben) of a format not long ago dismissed as obsolete.¹ In the process, we’ve witnessed a growing influx of cassette labels in DIY music scenes worldwide, as musicians and listeners embrace tapes as an inexpensive alternative to vinyl records and a refuge from the overabundance of streaming music.

Trendspotting journalists have trumpeted a “cassette revival,” yet in many circles tapes never needed to be revived. Devoted experimental and noise musicians have long used cassettes to manipulate and fabricate sounds and distribute finished works. Religious ministries across the United States and Australia kept duplication plants rolling throughout the 2010s by distributing cassette sermons to their septuagenarian parishioners. Police forces in the United Kingdom used cassettes for interview recordings as late as 2012, citing the format’s ease of use as a key reason for postponing the shift to digital recording.²

Where there is a resurgence, observers have too often treated it as a short-term fad for urban hipsters, rather than as a genuine, grassroots interaction among music devotees. As both music scholars and enthusiasts, our frustration with the persistence of revivalist sensationalism prompts us to trace the cassette’s current cultural and economic significance from two perspectives: one focused on original music distribution on cassette, the other on redistribution through mix taping. Through these respective studies of tapes, we offer a mix to challenge one-dimensional notions of obsolescence.

Hybridity on a Reel

In 2018 and 2019, Ben conducted interviews with more than eighty musicians, label owners, shop operators, and collectors in Australia, Japan, and the United States. The vastness of international tape projects is indicated by, for example, the number of cassette releases listed on the music database Discogs, which peaked at over twenty-five thousand new titles in 2021 alone.³ The impetus for using tapes includes enhanced opportunities for networking and collaboration: for instance, through “split tapes” released by two or more artists who contribute their music to either side of the format.⁴ Furthermore, because they do not facilitate immediate skipping between tracks, cassettes encourage mindful listening that circumvents the glut of online music. Some Scottish cassette label heads, for example, refuse to post their music online, “to interrupt the contemporary sense of instantaneous access to anything,” thereby forcing users to reflect on why certain tracks are liked or disliked in real time.⁵ The experience of the tape’s slow, linear reel shapes its cultural value. Across DIY music scenes, cassettes are traded as cultural currency where they embody a distinct form of participation and aesthetic identity.

Yet the present ruptures between postmillennial cassette practices and the past are just as notable as the continuities. While some cassette adopters, especially in punk and noise scenes, fervently carry on the coarse Xeroxing aesthetic of their 1980s forbearers, most contemporary labels and artists use slick Photoshop-crafted artwork for their releases, prioritizing the visual qualities of cassettes at least as much as their sound characteristics.

Once synonymous with mobile listening, the postmillennial cassette is now mostly relegated to the home, often functioning as a container for Bandcamp download codes that grant access to more easily portable digital music files. This championing of the cassette’s appearance over its audio capabilities (borne out by a UK market research survey that found a quarter of cassette purchasers had no intention of listening to them) is attributable to several factors.⁶

First, used hi-fi cassette players, once plentiful and easily attainable, have grown scarce. The bottleneck has driven up prices for remaining units and limited the availability of replacement parts for cassette decks, which are notorious for being fiddlier to repair than turntables. Second, new players fall short on build and sound quality, especially when compared to the units that corporations like Sony produced until the early 2000s. New players feature little to no noise reduction. Even worse, the It’s OK cassette player, newly advertised in 2019 primarily for its Bluetooth connectivity, only produces a mono signal, thus catapulting the listener back to the earliest incarnation of consumer cassette tech in the mid-1960s. Finally, since running out of stock in the mid-2010s, manufacturers have ceased producing high-grade chromium oxide audiotape, thus diminishing fidelity at the cassette’s very core.⁷

Of the handful of US companies still producing blank tapes, the largest is National Audio Company in Springfield, Missouri, which bought unused tape production equipment in the 2000s and recently converted credit card production equipment for magnetic audio tape.⁸ The conditions for current cassette production, however, are incomparable to their ubiquity in the late twentieth century. Though National Audio touts their ferric and cobalt oxide tape formulas as the highest grades currently produced, their compatibility with hardware featuring decades-old tape heads and noise reduction systems is now being assessed by cassette enthusiasts worldwide. The jury is still out on these new formulas of new-old technologies, but the fact that the cassette persists despite these precarious circumstances underscores its symbolic heft. Through original recording and rerecording, cassette culture continues to thwart obsolescence by rendering this ostensibly dated format freshly present. Yet there are other pasts in this mix—many of them deeply personal—that need mention.

Ghosts of the Mix Tape

Rob first came to cassette scholarship by studying music fans’ rituals of compiling music on mix tapes and compact discs. It was the mid-2000s, when the popularization of CD burners spawned its own brief renaissance in the physical exchange of music. Yet among older interviewees (and even younger ones more susceptible to the charms of analog media), an acute sense of nostalgia for the mix tape still held. The mix tape carried a talismanic quality that the mix CD could not touch.

Mixers missed the tactile routines of mix taping and the endless hours spent hunched over stereo equipment cueing up album cuts. Most of all, they missed the relational embeddedness of mix taping; by shepherding songs onto tape in a spirit attentive to a particular listener, mixers seemed to hear the songs afresh and invest them magically with their own interpersonal magnetism. Well into the 2000s, loyalists continued mixing to cassettes, scouring dollar stores and swap meets for increasingly hard-to-find, high-bias blank tapes.

The analog mix tape has shown continued signs of life in a few corners of the internet. At the Instagram account Mixtape Exchange, you can sign up to swap mix tapes with anonymous users based on a questionnaire that matches your interests; mixers as far afield as Serbia, Denmark, Australia, and Japan have participated.⁹ Despite such isolated cases, though, few people are talking about a triumphant revival of mix taping. Music streaming and playlists have rendered the practice nearly obsolete. In this age of algorithms and digital content, the mix tape lives on as a symbol. The homegrown practice that first unhinged songs from albums has become an all-purpose metaphor to invoke the past and ground the daunting flow of digital music.

While personal, the nostalgia has also become commercial. When Starbucks’s Hear Music imprint began stocking stores with genre-based CD compilations, CEO Don MacKinnon stated that the coffee chain aspired to be like “that friend in college down the hall who played great music and made great mixes… a lot of us feel we don’t have that friend anymore.”¹⁰ When Apple added features to its music store that allowed ordinary users to post playlists that could be purchased with one click, tech guru Steven Johnson lauded them for empowering that “unrewarded group [of] people with great taste in music—the ones who made that brilliant mix for you in college that you’re still listening to.”¹¹ And when Spotify added its Discover Weekly feature which furnished personalized playlists to each of its millions of users, product manager Matthew Oglegushed, “We wanted to make something that felt like your best friend making you a mixtape… every single week.”¹² By taking on the mantle of the mix tape, vendors of all manner of playlists—physical or virtual, human- or machine-generated—now pass themselves off as surrogates for the mythical friend whose contributions to our musical experience we once implicitly trusted.

Whatever the innovations of music streaming platforms, critics rarely discuss them with the same passion still routinely invested in the mix tape. For all their networked, hypermediated affordances, such platforms seem to covet the mix tape’s intimacy.

The social music sites that have come and gone over the last two decades are rarely mourned like the mix tape’s modest media of Maxell, Denon, and TDK. And if this is the case, it’s partly because the mix tape was so elusive in the first place. Built on stories and fantasies, the mix tape was an object of nostalgia almost from the moment it was named.

Outro

Trials and tribulations aside, DIY practitioners continue to embrace cassettes, not merely as collectibles but as a participatory currency of grassroots music distribution and consumption. Raymond Williams famously argued that residual cultural forms often persist not merely as obsolescent vestiges, but as cherished alternatives representing areas of human experience that the dominant culture neglects or undervalues.¹³ The cassette is a case in point. Despite the immediacy and convenience of our new media age, the world hasn’t yet pulled the plug on tapes and their cohesive, slowly circulating material culture. Whether it functions as a keepsake to reignite memories or as a conduit for participation in creative networks and subcultures, the cassette continues to transcend obsolescence. Spinning on with unmistakable magnetism, the cassette tape demonstrates, once more, that the lifecycles of media are anything but linear. ■

1. Rob Drew, Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable (Duke University Press, 2024); Benjamin Duester, Tomorrow on Cassette: Tape Jams in the New Media Age (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). ↩︎
2. David Novak, Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (Duke University Press, 2013); Emily Freidenrich, Almost Lost Arts: Traditional Crafts and the Artisans Keeping Them Alive (Chronicle Books, 2019); Alex Hudson, “Who, What, Why: Why Do People Still Use Cassette Tapes?” BBC News, December 3, 2012. ↩︎
3. “Cassettes For Sale at Discogs Marketplace,” Discogs, May 18, 2024. ↩︎
4. Benjamin Duester, “‘There’s a Lot of Freedom You Can Have with That Kind of Thing’: Vinyl and Cassette Split Releases in the Digital Age,” Media, Culture & Society 45, no. 7 (2023): 1370–1386. ↩︎
5. Kieran Curran, “‘On Tape’: Cassette Culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow Now,” in 21st Century Perspectives on Music, Technology, and Culture: Listening Spaces, eds. Richard Purcell and Richard Randall (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 46. ↩︎
6. “Survey Says One in 10 Young People Buy Cassette Tapes,” BBC Newsbeat, April 16, 2014. ↩︎
7. “Survey Says One in 10 Young People Buy Cassette Tapes,” BBC Newsbeat, April 16, 2014. ↩︎
8. Ryan Dezember and Anne Steele, “Global Shortage of Magnetic Tape Has Cassette Lovers Reeling,” Wall Street Journal, November 4, 2017. ↩︎
9. Jehnie Burns, “The Mixtape as Continued Community Engagement,” paper presented at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music Conference, Philadelphia, April 2024. ↩︎
10. Michael Booth, “The Starbucks Lifestyle: It’s Not Just about Coffee Anymore,” Denver Post, May 20, 2003. ↩︎
11. Emily Eakin and Felicia R. Lee, “2003’s Most Overrated and Underrated Ideas,” New York Times, December 27, 2003. ↩︎
12. Stuart Dredge, “Spotify Bites Back at Apple Music with Weekly ‘Mixtape’ Playlist for Each User,” Guardian, July 20, 2015. ↩︎
13. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 123–24 ↩︎