This Black Friday weekend, while the rest of the world was trying to get the best bargain on the latest Bluetooth, noise-cancelling thingumies, or maybe going slightly retro and buying a turntable so they can take part in the vinyl revival, a small but growing group of people were pressing eject on the whole thing.
The world of Airpods and Megabooms is not for them. They're interested in a format that most people had assumed was dead, whose revival was either a gimmick or symbolic of a hipster trend, but not the sign of a format with a future.
And yet, cassette tapes are back. Amazon is selling new cassettes - and they're not cheap either; they are one thing that is not in the Cyber Monday sale - and eBay is full of them.
Cassette sales more than doubled in the UK last year and although their share of the music market is still tiny (less than 1%), there were still 22,000 new cassettes sold in 2017. In July this year, the Official Charts Company revealed that sales for the first half of 2018 were up 90% year-on-year. Cassette Store Day, the tape collector's version of Record Store Day, was last month.
DJ magazine, meanwhile, has already claimed that the cassette revival has become an essential and exciting part of the electronic music scene, allowing smaller artists the chance to do sought-after limited releases: "The tape revival also allowed music that may have never reached a global audience to do so in physical format."
Here are some of the cassettes currently on sale on Amazon, and some bargains to be had on eBay should you be tempted...
Here are some great eBay deals on cassettes right now:
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