• Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    If you’re curious, nearly half a million cassettes sold last year, too, according to Billboard.

    I’m more curious about who’s still selling music on cassette and who’s willing to buy it.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Someone else told me that. What bullshit. “You can’t have audio technology that was developed in the 1980s” is a fucking stupid punishment. Why not just make them listen to Edison cylinders?

        • nameisnotimportant@lemmy.ml
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          7 months ago

          Not for sure, but I have a few leads.

          I’ve heard and discussed with artists who mentioned that producing vinyl was very expensive compared to cassettes, which are cheap and easy to DIY.

          Then I’d add that cassettes have a retro appeal nowadays. Lastly, they are an analog format, opposite to the CD which is the 1:1 copy of the downloaded FLAC album downloaded from Bandcamp.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Analog, sure, but very low quality. 1/8" tape is not enough to reproduce sound accurately and there’s a lot of tape hiss. There’s a reason why professional analog multitrack studios use 1" tape.

            • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
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              7 months ago

              Ehh, all those 1” tape machines are 8-tracks and designed for editing, not playback. Magnetic tape fidelity has a lot more to do with medium, bias and processing than the width of the tape itself.

              Hell, plenty of analog shops use four and eight track machines that run 1/4” tape!

              Compact cassette also has the potential to sound very good. If you would like a demonstration, look up the vwestlife yt channel or listen to a good tape on a good tape deck.

        • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
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          7 months ago

          Cheap short runs. National will do 50 unit orders and you can sell em at 5-7$ and you’re still doubling your money on tour tapes.

            • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
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              7 months ago

              idk how many people have functional tape decks but you can still buy new production component and portable ones and there’s a healthy used market.

    • BlushedPotatoPlayers@sopuli.xyz
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      7 months ago

      I think there was a 99% invisible podcast episode about that, it’s prison inmates. For some never-changed rule they are only allowed music on cassettes, so they are probably the target audience mainly.

      Just a few years ago I had an old car with a cassette player/radio, and from time to time I enjoyed the cassette player with some leftover stuff, but in most cases I just used an FM transmitter

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        The prison system sucks in so many ways. Legal slavery with archaic rules that would be considered hate crimes or human rights violations if they happened to people in the U.S. who aren’t incarcerated.

        As far as old cars with cassette players. Like you said, you can use an FM transmitter, but I also remember having a fake cassette with an aux cable so you could plug it into a CD player headphone jack. I would bet they have a bluetooth version these days, so you don’t have to listen to cassettes even in those cars.

        That reminds me of something though. When I was a kid, we had a Toyota Corona station wagon with an 8-track player. My father had this converter device that you plugged into the 8-track and it had a little tray that you laid a cassette into so you could play it. I don’t remember if the sound quality was worse than playing a cassette in a player designed for it.

        • BlushedPotatoPlayers@sopuli.xyz
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          7 months ago

          Sure, there are transmitters without Bluetooth. I somehow preferred the SD card, as it would hold a few Gb of music and needed no internet connection. The only downside was if I was driving short trips only for a while, and it stuck with a 20-min long Deep Purple concert track every time :)

        • bitchkat@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          I had a friend with the cassette adapter for his 8 track player. I just brought my boombox with me in high school. It sounded better than the shitty stereo that came with my dad’s 1972 Mercury Capri.

    • KptnAutismus@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      some bands, and their fans. you can make a cassette look pretty dope.

      and i’ve heard prisoners often only have access to cassettes.