Any other cassette collectors here?

I kind of get vinyl but what the fuck is the point of collecting cassettes?

For new releases, Amazon. For old stuff, thrift stores

>the inconvenience makes you enjoy it more
ding ding ding. That's why I love physical music in general.
same reason as vinyl

cassettes are cool but they're the least durable of the physicals and have a very small but growing selection of new stuff

yes cassettes and records are both inconvenient but only one of those has better sound quality

>cheap
>cool retro format
>exclusive releases

>same reason as vinyl
Vinyl is a hell of a lot cooler to have and show off than cassettes though.

This. Also, inconvenient but portable.
Cassettes are about 1/3 the price of LPs.

What makes one cooler than the other?

Nothing to me is cooler than one of those shiny rectangular tape boomboxes from the 80s.

I work at a record store. I found a weird ass cassette today at work. It had hand-written labels:

Side A: "LISTEN TO THIS SIDE FIRST."
Side B: "LISTEN TO THE OTHER SIDE FIRST."

Naturally I was curious, so I popped it in a tape deck and it was a recording of a young guy in the air force apologizing to his girlfriend for some argument he caused before he got deployed and telling her that he loves her. It sounded like he set up a tape deck in his room on base and was just rambling to her about how much he couldn't wait to get home. I only made it about ten minutes in. It felt wrong to listen any further.

>Nothing to me is cooler than one of those shiny rectangular tape boomboxes from the 80s.
lol

Why was that at the store?
And yeah, it must have been kinda sad. If it were just friends joking around, I would keep listening.

People sell and donate used music to us all the time. Sometimes people will just donate boxes with hundreds of records or tapes, and we have to go through them and decide which ones are worth keeping, cleaning up, and selling and which ones aren't worth anything and should be donated. I found it in our donation box and I got curious.

Interesting.
Where should I look to find a schedule of upcoming physical releases?

I mean, I have my whole music collection cataloged on Discogs and there's a feature on the home page that shows upcoming releases from artists in your collection/wantlist, so when one of my favorite artists is releasing a new album or when an old album in my waitlist is getting ressiued, I usually see it on there first.

Does it show all the formats available?

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Yeah

Make sure the tape heads, pinch roller and capstan are clean. If any of those are sticky, especially pinch roller which are usually made of rubbery material, chewing can happen

Does anyone else think that the concept of an masterpiece album declined in frequency with every format change?
From LP>Cassette>CD>Downloads>Streaming

*prevalence of masterpiece albums I should say

Yes, because each format has made it easier and easier for shitty artists to get their music out there.
>LP
You had to take your music to a studio and get it recorded, mixed, and mastered properly and then you had to send off the master tapes to a pressing plant and get expensive metal plates made. Then you had to pay for a certain amount of records to be pressed and distribute them to the public. It was a very long expensive process, so people took making a record more seriously. If you were going to make a record, it was going to cost you a lot of money and you had to be serious about it. You also had to keep the limitations of the medium, such as time contraints, in mind.
>Cassette
Anybody could buy a box of blank cassettes and record their music onto them, but you had to own a tape deck with a record function and you had to pay for the tapes. Unless you were rich, you probably didn't own a lot of slave duplicators and you had to record each tape in real time. It was WAY cheaper than making a vinyl record, but it still cost money and time. Like vinyl, cassettes could only hold a limited amount of music so you had to be mindful of how you use your time.
>CD
Same as cassettes, except you could burn CDs much faster and they held more data, meaning you had to pay less attention to time constraints and you didn't have to dedicate as much of your personal time to duplicating them.
>Download
No time contraints whatsoever. Nothing to stop you from uploading a .zip folder with a hundred shitty filler songs in it and calling it an album. Your listeners still had to go out of their way to download it though.
>Streaming
Same as digital files, except now people don't even have to download your shit. Its peak laziness.

CDs also have tracks on them, and do not need to be rewound or flipped. I think that was a huge convenience jump over tapes.

The other problem with streaming is, even though people can listen to as many albums as they want for free, it's still the hot singles that gets them the most sales. Artists are also rewarded for releasing 25 song long albums (even if all of them except the singles are garbage).

Something like 85% of Drake's streams from his album last year are from 3 songs. The album is in an even worse state than the iTunes era, it's like we're back in 1961 again.

Also, the other bad thing about streaming is that it causes quicker album fatigue. I feel like I'm not judging albums fairly because I might listen to a string of 5 of them in a row for free.

I've got about 1000, 50/50 split between new stuff and old weird dollar store finds. Don't worry about finding a nice deck, they're essentially disposable and will go bad no matter how nice they are.

Somebody needs to come out with something great to remind people why the album format fucking rules. Something like Pet Sounds. Brian Wilson felt the same way you do, so he set out to make a great album from front to back, with no filler songs. He wanted something that sounded like a whole idea, and not a random collection of ideas.

Your ears are pretty mediocre bruh

Unfortunately it seems unlikely with hip hop being the dominant genre right now, a lot of the prominent rappers seem like they just want to slap something together to get as much streams as possible.

I will try to make an art album, user. If I have enough money and clout, I won't even put it on spotify, I'll force people to buy it to take away the "disposability" of it.

bump

Yup. I grew up hometaping since my parents only listened to the radio and we didn't have record/CD players.
I buy tapes every now and then, have something like 40 of them. It's a nice, cheaper alternative to records if you have a decent tape deck.
Pic related is a recent purchase.

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Damn you used to have to commit to that shit back in the day.

Threw them all out when I was 15 and I got my first CD player. Cassettes were shit and anyone saying otherwise weren't around for them to be the only medium people had.

but they're fun, user. Streaming might be the most convenient but it's not the most satisfying for everyone, myself included.

They sound like shit. They sounded twice as shit on an affordable Sony walkman complete with massive wobble from cheap rubber band drive.
No, that's one thing that doesn't deserve nostalgia. It was shit, the world moved on.

If they're such shit, why did people buy as many as 400 million of them in a given year instead of just continuing to buy LPs?

Because they were cheap? Do you have any fucking idea how expensive purchasing vinyl deck that wasn't complete fucking shit, an amp to drive it and speakers to put it through was?
Then the vinyls themselves were expensive as fuck. Easily 2-3 times the price of an original cassette recording, then there's the recording aspect of it.
We owned a vinyl deck, after the drive broke down, it was never used again due to cost. Nor was the amp or the speakers it was hooked up to. Cheap ass 2 deck cassette players were relatively plentiful though.

When the only competition was FM radio playing schläger music, that's when you get 400 million sales a year.

Does schlager music exist in the US?

The most successful physical format was CDs though, they sold almost a billion every year in the US from 1998 to 2002. Despite their decline, they're actually doing a lot better now than cassettes were in the early 2000s

No idea, but the late 70s and throughout the 80s was a sad time as a music fan in my part of Europe.

You fags had 99 luftballons, though.

And I don't know about continental Europe, but the UK never stopped pumping out great music.

On the radio? Lol no. It was mostly old people's music. We didn't even have commercial radio until the late 80s.

Are you from a communist part of Europe?

Almost. Norway.
1 TV channel, 2 Radio channels, all state owned. Norway was shit poor.

Well now you guys are rich and still have beautiful Agnetha Faltskog looking women.
My dream is to have a nice looking Scandinavian gf sit on my face

Rip and upload it - i want to sample that

Cassette collection is the most hipster shit ever.

It's just not possible to beat digital media for convenience to use and at this point not really for audio-quality either. I get that many people like physical collecting and vinyl has the advantage of coming in massive ass sleeves that you can hang up like paintings and sometimes having cool weird looking discs. But cassettes though? What the fuck would you want these for if not to match your VHS collection and Mac Demarco inspired outfit?

I guess they're probably cheaper than vinyl, but CD's are cheap as fuck and way more practical to use than cassettes.

Because digital audio, including CDs, is too convenient since you can skip tracks

I’d probably never buy a new release unless there was a specific reason, but thrifting old tapes and recording my own mixes is fun

I collected vinyl for a few years, but I recently started buying a lot of CDs and I'm having a lot of fun with it. They're cheap, convenient, still physical, and have top tier sound quality when mastered properly

>Vinyls were considered useless for a while
No they weren't, vinyggers were always too stubborn to use anything else. My dad owned a record shop and said people always we're buying them.

cassettes go great hand-in-hand with vinyl records, I don't see why y'all see it as a one or the other thing
recording mixtapes off vinyl is great fun, and if you have a decent tape deck combined with good cassettes, the sound quality will not be noticeably worse than playing the records outright. Popping in a cassette is like something in between listening to a vinyl record and playing a digital playlist. Slightly more convenient, but not just clicking play.
oh, and good blank cassettes are not cheaper than vinyl records unless we're talking rare releases.

missed this on boomkat, hoping for a repress

It went almost instantly OOP on boomkat I recall. I immediately went to Krikor's bandcamp and there were like 3 copies left or something. Grabbed one instantly and I'm glad I did since it's already 50+ bucks or something on Discogs right now.