In two somewhat-related news articles last week, the cassette is being brought back by people who are interpreting it as an art project, and classic vinyl album covers are being issued as stamps. I was intrigued to read that there are small shops like the Tapeworm that are bringing out limited edition (typically 250 copies) cassette-only releases, which often sell out.
As the BBC says,
“We do not view this as a dead format,” says The Tapeworm’s Philip Marshall. “We do not view this as something which does not have a place right now.
“We were looking for a way to edition music in small runs that was cost effective and would also make the artists we were commissioning think about the ‘a’ and the ‘b'”.
He is referring to the ‘a’ and ‘b’ sides of the cassette.
“There’s a lost art to the ‘a’ and the ‘b’,” he says of downloaded music in particular, “a lost art to a sequence of music, a lost art to the album.”
So my love of nostalgia stands vindicated. In fact, there’s money to be made from it, if you look for your audience hard enough!
One Size Fits One 