Amazingly, People Are Still Listening To Tapes N’ Tapes

Today’s New York Times looks at the state of the audiocassette,* noting that last year, the format was responsible for a mere 1 percent of all music sales. But cassettes have found a large following among Tom Clancy fans:

[The] format still accounts for 37 percent of audio books’ $871 million in annual sales, according to the Audio Publishers Association.

What could possibly be listeners’ attraction to cassettes, which melt in the heat, snap in the cold and hiss in the ear? For listening to a book, cassettes are an oddly elegant medium, analog like a book itself. If you need to hear a paragraph again, rewind for a few seconds rather than jumping back several minutes to where a CD’s track began. Older CD players don’t resume where you left off, meaning you have to hunt around to find your place.

Plus, said Eileen Hutton, vice president of Brilliance Audio, cassettes “crossplatform bookmark, which CDs don’t.” Say you drive to the shore and are halfway into Disc 17 of Richard Ford’s “Lay of the Land” when you arrive. Eject it from the car’s CD player, then transfer it to your compact CD player to take to the beach, and it will — sorry — always restart at the beginning. A cassette, on the other hand, would be right where you left it, as sure as the bent-over corner of a page.

And as for what listeners make up this mysterious one percent? Well, Coolfer points out that there are certain audiences where cassettes are pretty much a requirement (including prisoners, as it’s pretty hard to make a shiv out of an old take-up reel), and that plenty of cars on the road still have tape players. He also notes that a handful of indie-rockers have put tapes on the merch table, possibly hoping to spur some contrarian revival. We hope that’s the case, because we have about 14,000 unused Maxell points at home, and we still want that free tote bag.

[The Analog Geezer That Keeps Working] [NY Times] The Cassette’s Exceedlingly Slow Death [Coolfer]

* Cassettes, or “tapes,” are music-storage devices that were popular among listeners and retailers in the pre-digital age. They were invented during the 16th-century Protestant Reformation.