Cassettes are DEAD (?)

it's official cassettes are dead so I ran a poll on my channel I asked the question to Hi-Fi enthusiasts and audio files and of course the pro audio views of my channel when you're having a serious listening session what is your Source the multiple choice answers were streaming or digital download vinyl CD or other digital disk media cassette or YouTube slash tiktok slash SoundCloud or similar the results are Stark the clear winner well clear by a full one percentage point is streaming streaming but what's in second place again by a mere one percent is it vinyl CD cassette or YouTube CD it's CD that would be the compact disk format first released in 1982 that everyone thinks is dead so we have streaming in the lead at 37 CD in second place buy a nose at 36 percent but that leaves quite a few percents left behind I'll just eliminate YouTube Etc right now because I don't think that anyone would imagine it along with Tick Tock SoundCloud Etc being a serious Contender for the serious listening Crown so it's down to vinyl versus cassette which got 23 percent of the vote which got a mere a pathetic two percent vinyl vinyl received 23 of the vote compared to streaming's 37 it's somewhere behind but not as far as I might have thought but cassette two percent clearly the cassette format is well and truly dead well and truly according to my poll there is of course a glaring problem here it's called participation bias and you can look that up on Wikipedia for more details but basically it's where the participants in any survey or trial tend to self-select according to their established interests so if someone publishes a survey whether pigeon fanciest should receive better pay and conditions the result will be yes they should because most of the participants will be pigeon fanciest no one else is interested so I'd probably think that very few viewers of my channel are cassette lovers or cassette fanciers if that's a thing so naturally the response for that format is very low it might have to do with my video slagging off cassettes the cassette Revival so wrong on so many levels Link in the description now before anyone suggests I'm on a bit of a high horse regarding cassettes well firstly I've never been on a horse maybe a donkey as a child but that's as far as I'm prepared to go on that but on cassettes well back before CD was invented they had very practical uses I would be far from the only person back in the day to buy vinyl records and copy them to cassette for listening so that I could always hear the music without the inevitable clicks pops and surface noise I say that in the full knowledge that I'll be flamed in the comments but hey and for Music Makers the cassette was a fantastic format for Tascam to base their Porter Studio around and fostex their multi-trackers and to make demos to hook to label a r managers and music publishing professional managers I did that loads too but today what's the point in cassette I can see the point in vinyl Hi-Fi used to be a fantastic Hobby in the days when you could always aspire to a better system we're at a point in technology now where other than loudspeakers it's never going to get any better well not that anyone can hear comments but Nostalgia for the old days of Hi-Fi is definitely a thing and if records cost 20 or 30 Great British pounds or more well what's not to like about that cassette though going back to what I would say is the Heyday of cassette in the late 70s and very early 80s cassettes were always inferior to vinyl let me count the ways yes you could copy a record to cassette as I said earlier that was a valid use of the cassette format but the cassette would never sound as good as the first few playings of the vinyl vinyl has a better signal to noise ratio by about 10 decibels and unless you could afford a Nakamichi cassette deck it had a better high frequency response you could buy albums on cassette just as you could on vinyl high speed duplicating was never going to be Hi-Fi good enough to get by for the Casual music lover yes there was real-time duplication but still the sound quality wasn't as good as vinyl vinyl has its inevitable degradations over time but how often did people clean demagnetize and align their cassette decks most people never that's why they left the Dolby Switched Off on playback so that they could get back some of the high frequencies that were blocked by the dirt on the head well those are the negatives I suppose I should say that portable cassette players were a thing I don't think there ever was a record player that you could play while you were out jogging although you could get one for your car oh yes I suppose I should also say that in-car cassette players were probably a significant factor in cassette sales I nearly said significant consumer of cassettes because that was something that happened fairly often that's enough about me and about the participants in my survey what matters most are the people who spend money on music formats do people spend their actual hard-earned inflation-prone money on cassettes I have some data I'm reading from a blog post made April 2023 by the British phonographic industry or BPI which is like the riaa in the USA here are some highlights on 10 occasions last year the format accounted for over 10 percent of the chart sales of the number one album on the weekly official albums chart some of these chart-topping albums sold more copies on cassette than on vinyl when they debuted at number one cassette sales grew to 195 000 in 2022 a level not seen since before Apple launched its iTunes music download store in the UK every one of the top 10 cassette sellers in 2022 was released in 2022 okay Betty is paraphrasing a bit but you can read the post for yourself Link in the description the most surprising thing for me is that the top sellers last year were released last year so cassette buyers are buying new music and are presumably therefore young people okay there were a couple of re-releases of old music but have any of you Old-Timers out there heard of Jamie T Nooks blossoms no me neither those poor young people they could be listening to high quality High Fidelity sound on CD or streaming yet they bought cassette as an Old Timer myself I feel motivated to say what's wrong with the world but mostly when that's ever said it's because of change and new stuff happening this is old stuff Old Time stuff that should be dead and buried and turned into fossil fuel for my diesel car okay I don't have a conclusion but I suspect my interest in the cassette format may continue I won't be buying any though as a 23 year old person I consulted said no one's buying them no normal people anyway see you soon

Channel: Audio Masterclass

Views: 10,739

Keywords: Compact Cassette, BPI, British Phonographic Industry, sales figures

Id: 0-Oo7AHryyc

Length: 8min 0sec (480 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 19 2023