Retro Compact Cassettes tape
Opinion

Here’s an explanation for the crazies who year for a cassette resurrection.

I must state it again: Cassettes are an outmoded, outdated, awful technology that deserves to die. There is no reason to bring them back. Ever.

Yet there are those who have romanticized/fetishized them as something worth not just preserving but worshipping. But why? Bloomberg offers this opinion.

“As Goran Bolin of the Sodertorn University in Stockholm wrote in 2014, people “develop specific, sometimes passionate, relationships with reproduction technologies such as the vinyl record, music cassette tape, comics, and other now dead or near-dead media forms.” The passion, as Bolin put it, ‘is activated by the nostalgic relationships with past media experiences, the bittersweet remembrances of media habits connected to one’s earlier life phases.’ That means an attachment not just to a record, but to a specific record, which hiccups in a specific place and has a specific rip on its sleeve; not just to a song but to a cassette on which it was recorded as an afterthought.”

There’s more here.

Alan Cross

is an internationally known broadcaster, interviewer, writer, consultant, blogger and speaker. In his 40+ years in the music business, Alan has interviewed the biggest names in rock, from David Bowie and U2 to Pearl Jam and the Foo Fighters. He’s also known as a musicologist and documentarian through programs like The Ongoing History of New Music.

Alan Cross has 39576 posts and counting. See all posts by Alan Cross

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