Despite Their Uselessness, Cassettes Sales Continue to Trend Up

I won’t restate how much I hate cassettes. This was a fine technology for its day, but we’ve moved on. There’s no need for cassettes in 2016. Yet there seems to be a new love for these hateful, awful things.

Discogs, the massive online music database and marketplace, has issued a report on cassette sales. Here’s what they found.

• Sales are up whopping 43% from last year. But don’t get too excited, cassette fans. That means total sales of just 60,070 units. That’s a drop in the buck when it comes overall physical music sales. Vinyl, for example, sold 3.23 million units.
• As an aside–this part isn’t in the Discogs report–but 4,800 cassettes have been sold in Canada this year.
• Catalogue sales–that is, releases that are more than 18 months old–are up by 26% over last year.
• New releases are up 25%.

For more information, go here.