Music As A Souvenir: Cassette sales double during the pandemic

Music as a souvenir. It’s a concept I first witnessed during the download age when South Korean teens were buying truckloads of 45’s even when they didn’t own turntables.

It’s estomated that 40% of vinyl albums bought by millenials ar never played.

Fans want something they can touch and for many, cassettes are now filling that need.

By Iain Taylor, Lecturer in Music Industries, Birmingham City University from The Conversation

Described by some as “Europe’s biggest tech show”, the Berlin Radio Show has long been famous for exhibiting the next big thing in consumer electronics. In 1963, that was the compact audio cassette, introduced at the time by its creator, the late Dutch engineer Lou Ottens, who died in early March.

Over the course of Ottens’ lifetime, cassette tapes came to redefine listening habits, which until then had been limited to the much more unwieldy vinyl record. Car stereos and the iconic Sony Walkman suddenly made individual listening experiences possible outside of the home. The re-recordable nature