The streaming generation is trading Spotify for cassette tapes.
But despite Gen Z’s obsession with all things vintage — from flip phones to Y2K fashion reboots like Ed Hardy and Von Dutch — the integration of retro technologies is difficult even for the tech savants.
“I struggled a little bit,” 26-year-old Amy Campbell, who purchased Kacey Musgrave’s album on a cassette tape this year, told the Wall Street Journal.
The Rockford, Illinois, resident borrowed her mom’s cassette player but found it confusing to use. She didn’t understand how to insert the tape or shuffle through songs.
“You have to keep fast-forwarding, rewinding, pausing and playing to find the right song you want,” she lamented.
But not all Zoomers have the luxury of parents who kept their Walkmans.
Molly Clark’s 13-year-old daughter bought an Aurora cassette but couldn’t play it, forcing Clark, 45, to buy a player on eBay.
“It makes me smile whenever I see it because it just takes me back to when I was a kid,” Clark told The Journal.
Cassettes became nearly obsolete at the turn of the century after the CD boom and the introduction of digital music and streaming services, such as Apple Music and Spotify.
But the new-age technology hasn’t deterred young audiophiles from listening to music on old-school devices. In fact, cassette sales are up, with more than 430,000 sold last year — approximately five times more than what was sold almost a decade prior, The Journal reported.
Similarly, vinyl sales have soared in recent years, surpassing CD sales in 2023, in part thanks to fanbases of über-popular artists such as Taylor Swift.
“It’s a cash cow now,” Jen Long, a London-based music manager who previously ran a cassette label, told The Journal. “It’s another format to get you up the charts and milk money from people.”
But Campbell said she likes “how nostalgic it sounds,” while other tape fans champion the convenience of a Walkman over the battery-sucking playback by streaming on their smartphones.
Others have been inspired by moments in pop culture, like movies or TV shows that depict characters listening to music or audio recordings on cassette tapes, such as the cast of “Stranger Things.”
“I read the book ‘Thirteen Reasons Why’ for a school project, and that featured someone who recorded messages on cassette [for others to listen to after her suicide],” tape collector Zoël Labelle, 23, previously told The Post.
“I feel like cassettes kind of got forgotten. But when they were kind of obscure enough to be unfamiliar to the younger generation, they became kind of cool,” he continued.
“Being my age, I see a lot of people, a lot of kids that are fascinated with things that are vintage, like old camcorders, T-shirts, comic books.”
But Lou Ottens, the inventor of the cassette, is ready for his brainchild to fall to the wayside.
“People prefer a worse quality of sound out of nostalgia,” he previously said in the 2016 documentary “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape,” per The Journal.
