The Cassette Revival is a Scam (and we all know it).

Are cassettes actually back, or are we just nostalgic for a headache? From the technical superiority of MiniDiscs to the tactical reasons why CCs survived, we dive deep into the 'new' tape trend. Discover why the true history of the cassette is much more interesting than an Instagram filter.

By Marcellusconi · 2026-04-30 · 4 min read

During the years of the advent of digital technologies, such as DCCs and the first DACs, we were enthusiastic about the possibility of accessing every track of an album with a simple click.

Scrolling through the songs of a CD thanks to a remote control was the ultimate in terms of convenience and the sound performance, even of mediocre systems, seemed exponentially improved.

Acronyms like TOC and RAM became common in the world of Hi-Fi, and thanks to the reduction of moving parts, some portable CD and MD playback devices could guarantee hours and hours of music with just two AA batteries. Meanwhile portable tape players, especially the cheaper ones, drained batteries so much that they dissuaded those who owned them from using them.

No rotting pinch rollers, no needles to position, cassettes to rewind, or revolution counts to meticulously note down with Hi-Fi quality at prices that were, all things considered, not that exorbitant.

Yet all these digital formats are now history or nearly-so, while we witness the return of music cassettes. But are we truly sure that this is the case?

Today everyone sings the praises of CCs, but are we sure we remember what it meant to duplicate a cassette, their qualities and the costs?

Let's take it step by step.

For years, I myself used compact cassettes. I created and designed the covers and recorded mixtapes and I can tell you that I wouldn't make another one even under torture after the advent of software like Nero or SonyStage for MDs.

Costs:

At the time there were tape deck mechanisms and endless options, from the iconic Nakamichi Dragon to very poor telemarketing cassette recorders like cheap Type I cassettes up to oltrageus expensive Type IV CCs.

To have a quality on par with an MP3 downloaded from Napster required a decent recording deck and at least a Type III cassette for £5 at the time; today, we would talk about £10 for 90 minutes of music with a quality barely within the parameters to define it as Hi-Fi.

Speed:

If you didn't have double decks with 2x speed in copying from unit A to unit B, to record 90 minutes you needed... 90 minutes.

To record a mixtape would take entire afternoons, with methodical and repetitive practice to avoid pauses that were too long or too short between one track and another, taking note of the revolutions and ensuring a good recording output.

Perhaps for this reason giving a mixtape as a gift truly meant something. The personalisation of the cover, the cost of the cassette, the time dedicated to recording it and understanding and interpreting the tastes of the recipient and the pleasure of sliding a cassette into the car radio to almost never take it out thanks to the pleasant and personal sequence.

Durability:

Fifteen minutes on the dashboard of a car parked in the sun in August or a lifetime if in stable conditions and with players with decent mechanics.

All this while MDs were appearing at more justifiable prices. I took my faithful Sony Minidisc to the beach, the mountains, left it in the car under the sun, let a battery rot inside, forgot it in a drawer for almost a decade and it still works. In my 16th year, I had a walkabout MD with 80 minutes recorded in LP4, therefore with a good five hours of music at a quality comparable if not superior to any chrome-iron cassette recorded on home systems.

Yet the MD is "dead" (although not quite) while CCs never truly went extinct and today "new" portable players are appearing which I don't want to talk about, I'll leave that to the legendary Techmoan since just naming them makes me nervous.

REVIEW : 'We Are Rewind' portable cassette player (published 3 years ago) — Embedded content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WleZGWAebsY

But why all this? Why have cassettes survived until today and why is time and money being invested in their revival?

During the 90s until the hipster revival for music cassettes, CCs survived thanks to various niche markets, before being reduced to a single producer of mechanisms, cheap and poor, and a handful of music cassette producers.

The happiest market for CCs after the advent of digital media was the one linked to the visually impaired public through audiobooks.

Audiobooks on cassette are still widespread throughout the world for these reasons:

The Tactile Feedback.

Unlike CDs, which are fragile and difficult to handle without visual references, the cassette has an asymmetrical shape that allows one to immediately understand the direction of insertion.

Mechanical buttons:

Cassette recorders had large, physical and "clickable" buttons (Play, Rec, Rewind), easily identifiable by touch.

Physical memory:

If you turned off the player, the tape stayed exactly at that point. A cheap CD player often restarted from the beginning of the track, making listening to a book frustrating.

Then there is the whole religious market, the car radios that fitted tape decks as standard until 2010, and a third world that in any case had to rely on repairable mechanics and formats...

However, a well-known site today aims for the rebirth of the cassette and promotes collecting them, ruining the market for those who today collect cassettes at the price of 50 cents apiece.

This rebirth of CCs is a flash in the pan with incredible numbers like a 200% increase in sales from 2024 to 2025 only because some artists have thought it best to produce "limited editions" on cassette just to squeeze as much money as possible from collectors. Those who will suffer the consequences of this "hunger for profit" are the real collectors, those who don't buy cassettes because it has recently become cool on Instagram but because they have always collected them.