since this comes up about once a week on my twitter and deserves more than 140char response, a quick post here should do nicely.
there are 2 ways I look at the cassette tape, being that I am both a music maker and a music consumer.
as a maker:
its a quick way to get a physical document of a “release”.
why do you need a physical document?
well even at this day and age it feels weird to have a “digital download release show”. i think people still want some kind of “thing” to take home after the show.
why not make CD’s?
well i have a number of friends that have just flat out stopped buying cd’s. and i can understand that to some degree. one is just going to go home and rip the cd into iTunes and then shelve the cd for eternity. the 1′s and 0′s on the cd are represented fairly well in a high quality mp3, especially on 90% of the peoples home stereo setups. a tape, being analog, has a tonal quality that is inherent in the format. there is also a certain ritual to playing a tape, much like playing an LP, you have to physically engage with the playback.
LP’s are far superior to Tapes in sound quality, why not press an album?
see: speed and cost. I can send out a few wav files to a tape plant and within 3 weeks have a box of 50 tapes at my door for about 1/3 the cost of making a 7inch record. also i cant put as much music on a 7inch as I could on a tape. i haven’t looked into this fully but i think you can make smaller runs of tapes than of vinyl. I dont think there are many pressing plants that would do a sub 200 item run. and why would they. it is a bit more work. you have to send the audio, they send a test pressing back to make sure it sounds ok, and they they do the run.
while tapes dont sound like LP’s, I have heard quite a number of them sound pretty damn good. I was able to pick up a decent used tape deck at a garage sale that plays tapes back with little to no wow/flutter or hiss. if the band did a good recording, a tape will represent the fidelity of that recording.
as a very small indie ambient/noise/glitch artist i want to have some kind of art to give ppl that are interested, but I know that group is rather small.
as a consumer:
there is a small amount of nostalgia going on, i can’t deny that. i grew up taping things off the radio, buying tapes at the mall. i spent every second of my newpaper route listening to a tape of some sort. I even still had mostly tapes in college (and I am not that old). also I am a fan of artists that also like to make small runs of music for the reasons stated above or because of a connection to a scene (which I cant even begin to get into but basically it seems the noise/avant-garde circles have loved to release on cassette for a very long time).
also if there is a band I want to check out but dont know really well, i will gravitate toward their tape release verse a 7inch because it will most likely give me more music so that I can make a better judgement of the band. as a music nerd i want to hear of all of the music ever made. some of that only comes out on cassette. i need to hear that, it could change my life.
please feel free to correct me or add you own opinions below.
RT @
RT @