As a general rule, it’s safe to assume that things become obsolete for a reason – or so I imagine ChatGPT saying to a pixelated version of Elon Musk once artificial intelligence has made humans extinct. But there are exceptions to this, of course, when things get consigned to history long before their time: dodos, for example, and Liz Truss’s political career. Then there’s the humble cassette tape, widespread production of which ceased at around the same time as John Major’s government.
Oh, how I wept when it became impossible to pop down to Our Price, or Woolworths, and have a rifle through the bargain bin for a 50p copy of Chesney Hawkes’s last single. How I resented the endlessly scratched CD, the finickety MiniDisc, and later the pernicious pressure of the iPod, forcing me to take 10,000 songs with me to the corner shop to buy a pint of milk.
“I just want to listen to a Britney B-side!” I would wail disconsolately as I attempted to work out how to “download” an album to the iPod via my computer. And you might think that two decades on, I would have got used to streaming music on Spotify, or Apple Music, or whichever big tech brand intent on taking over the world that I am required to provide my credit card details to every month, if I ever want to listen to music again.
Then again, from the building resentment evident in this paragraph, you might have realised that no, this is absolutely not the case, and that I look upon music streaming technology as the reason for all society’s ills, except of course the ones that are the fault of Vladimir Putin.
Which is why I was absolutely overjoyed to read that the cassette tape is making a comeback. According to reports last week, sales of the format are the highest they have been for almost two decades. The British Phonographic Industry (the BPI) say that a whopping 195,000 cassettes were sold in 2022, and that the top sellers were not from old fogey bands, as expected, but from the likes of Harry Styles, Florence and the Machine and the Arctic Monkeys. According to experts, young people appreciate the retro vibe of the format, but also the fact that you are forced to actually listen to the music, rather than skipping forward to the next track.
And herein lies the source of my sadness about the demise of the tape: in my mind, music streaming has turned us all into fidgety, impatient souls with the attention spans of drain flies.
Our children will never know the agony of trying to record their favourite song off the live Top 40 on a Sunday afternoon, the opening chords of the latest New Kids on the Block single forever marred by the not-so-dulcet tones of Bruno Brookes. They will never know what it was like to have to keep pausing and rewinding Prefab Sprout’s The King of Rock ’n’ Roll to check that the lyrics really were “hot dog, jumping frog, Albuquerque”. They will never know what it is like to have the tape of their favourite Take That album purposely unspooled by their little sister, meaning they have to spend an agonising hour trying to wind it back into its cassette. Most sadly of all, music streaming means they will never know the unique joy that is making a mixtape for a best friend, or receiving one from the first boy you ever had a crush on.
In an age of artificial intelligence, it seems counter-intuitive that the tape should be making a comeback. But perhaps it’s an inevitable reaction against the AI apocalypse, an attempt at soothing our tired and weary souls. If Musk was really smart, he’d abandon TruthGPT and start selling Teslas with tape decks; Apple could manufacture an entirely analogue boom box and Sony could bring back the Walkman, complete with old-fashioned metal headphones covered in sponges. You never know – the cassette tape could just end up saving the world.
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