Cassette tapes are apparently making a comeback. This has been reported on a few times in different publications, as tiny independent labels did cassette releases for their bands. Given that cassette releases are cheap, it allows a band with a low budget to have a physical release. It also appeals to nostalgia hounds, people who are convinced that the world has stopped advancing since they turned twelve and are suspicious of anything modern. Now it turns to us, the sane people, to stop this comeback from happening.
This is not that different from the vinyl revival that took hold a few years ago, where a formerly obsolete technology was revived as people decided that they didn't like compact discs anymore. The difference is that vinyl, at least, had a few advantages. One, it allowed for large cover art you could display on your wall, which looked very nice. Two, there was an argument for analog having better range than digital, especially when a CD is mastered on the loud side. This I can at least appreciate on a technical level, though most people won't notice it as much as the hiss and pop that most records develop quite quickly. I'm not going to buy that vinyl is amazing, but at least there was some logic behind that revival.
Cassettes, however, were discarded for a reason and should remain dead forever. They're too complicated, they have poor sound quality and they're prone to distortion. Anyone who has had to reassemble a worn tape knows just how much of a pain cassettes could be, and the only reason the format survived was because it was relatively portable and very easy to copy. You couldn't take your records out jogging, for example. The cassette simply ceased to be relevant as portable CD players became more resistant to skipping, and were finally killed in a flourish with the mass adoption of digital formats, which were both portable and much better at the cassette's other, less wholesome usage.
Since then it has been increasingly difficult to actually play cassettes. You cannot buy a car with a cassette player installed from the factory, for example, the last model so equipped being out of production since 2010. It's also relatively difficult to find a player - a cursory search of a popular electronics retailer saw very few hits. This has had the unintentional effect of making the format more desirable. It's obscure, it's a bit novel and the multitude of flaws give it character. This is wrong-headed, of course, the cassette was a generally terrible format and discarded for a reason. But trends are not dictated by logic, so the cassette has made a minor comeback.
The problem with nostalgia is that it ignores the reason you've discarded the things you now desire. I grew up with cassettes, I have many fond memories of tapes that were recorded off of friends, compiling a range of songs which I thought were amazing back when I was much smaller than I am today. But I don't forget why I don't own a single device that can play the format today. I threw out the cassettes because I could listen to the same songs in higher quality in different formats. The romance of the format is a fiction, created by people who are blinded by their reminiscence. We must remind them that cassettes died because they were awful.
