Listen, vinyl may be big, but cassette tapes are back too
Listen, vinyl may be big, but cassette tapes are back too
Salt Lake City resident Joe Maloy has been a fan of cassette tapes for almost 10 years.
In 2015, he bought a Jeep from his uncle. “The CD player didn’t work but it had a tape deck, and I was like, OK, well I guess I got to start buying tapes,” Maloy said.
Since then, Maloy has kept buying tapes. He also runs Salt Vault Records, a local tape label. He said cassette tapes are creative in a different way from CDs or vinyl.
“It’s really kitschy,” he said.
Kitschy, and right now, trendy.
In the last decade, young people have blown the dust off their parents’ record players and bought vinyl en masse. But it’s not always practical for smaller bands to release their music on vinyl. So some are turning to another blast from the past — cassette tapes.
There are subreddits dedicated to cassette culture that have tens of thousands of members. Tape fans show off their extensive collections on TikTok and Instagram.
And as it turns out, putting an album on cassette is good business. Cassette buyers spend 227% more money on music than your average listener, according to entertainment data insight company Luminate.
If bands don’t have the equipment to make the cassettes themselves, there are tape enthusiasts who are happy to help out. Nick Anderson of Far Out Cassette Club in Salt Lake City started out by making recordings of his own music on tape.
“When I looked into having someone else do it, it, like, costs a lot of money. And so I was like, oh, but you can just do it yourself at home,” Anderson said.
He now produces his own albums and works with Joe Maloy to create limited-run, small batches of tapes for local artists.
Anderson has what’s called a duplication station for cassette production, housed in a small basement room that’s filled with piles of tapes, a keyboard, drum set and various other instruments. The music is recorded from his computer through the duplicator and onto the tapes.
Then comes the fun part — decorating the J-card, which acts as the album cover for the tape. It’s that small, J-shaped piece of paper that sits in the case along with the cassette.
For a previous, coffee-themed release, Anderson created a unique cover for each tape by dripping actual coffee on the J-card.
“I just would, like, spill it down the sides of the cup, and I just set it on top of each J-card individually,” Anderson said. “I was hoping they would smell like coffee, but that didn’t really work.”
It’s all very DIY, so the startup cost is relatively low. Anderson even records over tapes he finds at thrift stores. In Salt Lake City, old audio recordings of the Book of Mormon text are a common find.
Jon Philpott, a musician who performs under the name fezmaster, started producing his music on cassette around three years ago.
“People have records, like, people are obviously collecting a lot of vinyl these days, but putting out vinyl is very difficult, very costly,” Philpott said.
Vinyl often requires a minimum order of 100 to 500 records. Even a small vinyl order can end up costing a band around $1,000 minimum. Meanwhile, a new pack of five 90-minute tapes costs around $13 on Amazon. A cheap duplicator runs about $65.
“The barrier to entry for making your tapes is really low, right? It’s very attractive in that respect,” Philpott said. Plus, Maloy, the tape label owner, said that low cost translates to a low sale price.
“I like tapes because it’s not a $60 record, you know. You can buy a record for $5 to $10,” Maloy said.
And that’s a good thing for artists and fans alike.
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