Last night, on October 4, NBC Nightly News spent a two and a half minute segment on the resurgence of cassette tapes and the music journalism world was thrown in to a frenzy. As of 9:30 am, Monday morning, both Pitchfork and Sterogum picked up the story as if to legitimize the ridiculous claims that cassette tapes are the superior form of music consumption.
The Nightly News segment focused on the National Audio Company and the boom in audio cassette production. The owner said they “contribute their success to stubbornness and stupidity,” but I assumed they were referencing the consumers of the analog medium and not their own business practices.
To make the short piece more relatable, they included an “indie musician,” Philip Dickey, reverently listening to a cassette tape on a 1980s boom box. He stated the popularity of cassette tapes can be traced to the fact that “digital streaming is short term…and cassette tapes are tangible.” If ANYTHING is short term, it’s cassette tapes. As I have written in a previous piece, those suckers have a short shelf life and will absolutely rip, tear and commit cassette tape suicide in your stereo.
And it has to be mentioned that when I looked up Philip Dickey and his band “Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin,” I found them on that little DIGITAL streaming service called Spotify. If I had to wait to get a cassette tape of their music, I would have forgotten about them and moved on, but instead, I spent a good 30 minutes enjoying their music while I worked.