watchnerd
Grand Contributor
According to this article, Millenials are bored with streaming and compressed digital, attracted to retro chic:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/a...e-tapes-are-back-but-it-s-not-about-the-music
"And yet the cassette is back. In the U.K., sales were up 112% year on year in the first half of 2019, even if that means only 36,000 cassettes were sold. Sales in the U.S. are growing, too."
"As Goran Bolin of the Sodertorn University in Stockholm wrote in 2014, people “develop specific, sometimes passionate, relationships with reproduction technologies such as the vinyl record, music cassette tape, comics, and other now dead or near-dead media forms.” The passion, as Bolin put it, “is activated by the nostalgic relationships with past media experiences, the bittersweet remembrances of media habits connected to one’s earlier life phases.” That means an attachment not just to a record, but to a specific record, which hiccups in a specific place and has a specific rip on its sleeve; not just to a song but to a cassette on which it was recorded as an afterthought.
Bolin did his research with older people – the World War II and Cold War generations. Many of the modern cassette or LP buyers never had any bittersweet childhood experiences with these media – but they’ve acquired a belated yearning for such experiences through some movie or another or the nostalgic memories of their parents’ generation. In other words, they want access to our experiences – a sense of emotional attachment to an object, something hard to achieve with a file in the cloud somewhere coming to the listener courtesy of a subscription service."
.....
Technics revived their turntable business to cater to the resurgent vinyl market?
Will we see some one reissue a cassette deck? TEAC? Nakamichi?
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/a...e-tapes-are-back-but-it-s-not-about-the-music
"And yet the cassette is back. In the U.K., sales were up 112% year on year in the first half of 2019, even if that means only 36,000 cassettes were sold. Sales in the U.S. are growing, too."
"As Goran Bolin of the Sodertorn University in Stockholm wrote in 2014, people “develop specific, sometimes passionate, relationships with reproduction technologies such as the vinyl record, music cassette tape, comics, and other now dead or near-dead media forms.” The passion, as Bolin put it, “is activated by the nostalgic relationships with past media experiences, the bittersweet remembrances of media habits connected to one’s earlier life phases.” That means an attachment not just to a record, but to a specific record, which hiccups in a specific place and has a specific rip on its sleeve; not just to a song but to a cassette on which it was recorded as an afterthought.
Bolin did his research with older people – the World War II and Cold War generations. Many of the modern cassette or LP buyers never had any bittersweet childhood experiences with these media – but they’ve acquired a belated yearning for such experiences through some movie or another or the nostalgic memories of their parents’ generation. In other words, they want access to our experiences – a sense of emotional attachment to an object, something hard to achieve with a file in the cloud somewhere coming to the listener courtesy of a subscription service."
.....
Technics revived their turntable business to cater to the resurgent vinyl market?
Will we see some one reissue a cassette deck? TEAC? Nakamichi?
