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Guest post by James Shotwell of HaulixThink cassettes are dead? Think again.
Not long ago, many industry movers and shakers believed all physical media to be either dying or dead. Streaming, they claimed, would soon replace the need for media in any other form. They were wrong.According to Nielsen’s recently released report on the music business, cassette sales in 2018 rose 23% over the previous year. That’s more than 4x the total number of cassettes sold in 2014 (roughly 25,000). In total, more than 215,000 tapes were sold during the calendar year, with many of the biggest totals coming from catalog releases more than a decade old.That figure is a far cry from 1994 when total sales for cassettes topped 246 million, but it’s a healthy number nonetheless. The market for cassettes has grown consistently in recent years and is likely to grow further still in 2019.The top-selling tape of 2018 was, perhaps unsurprisingly, Guardians of the Galaxy: Awesome Mix Vol 1. The release, which is one of three soundtracks from the Marvel comics film series to land on the best-sellers list, features packaging that is similar to a mixtape made and used by the lead character in the movie.
| R | Artist, Title | Sales |
| 1 | Soundtrack, Guardians of the Galaxy: Awesome Mix Vol. 1 |
24,000 |
| 2 | Soundtrack, Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2: Awesome Mix Vol. 2 |
19,000 |
| 3 | Twenty One Pilots, Trench | 7,000 |
| 4 | Soundtrack, Stranger Things: Music From the Netflix Original Series |
5,000 |
| 5 | Britney Spears, …Baby One More Time | 4,000 |
| 6 | Soundtrack, Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Mix, Vol. 1 |
3,000 |
| 7 | Guns N’ Roses, Appetite for Destruction | 3,000 |
| 8 | Metallica, The $5.98 EP: Garage Days Re-Revisited | 3,000 |
| 9 | Elvis Presley, Where No One Stands Alone | 2,000 |
| 10 | Wu-Tang Clan, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) | 2,000 |
