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I think the nostalgia that a lot of folks feel is that a tape is a physical unit of audio. With digital audio, your device can fit a ludicrous number of songs (

I think the nostalgia that a lot of folks feel is that a tape is a physical unit of audio. With digital audio, your device can fit a ludicrous number of songs (or stream magically from the cloud). With a tape, that physical object _is_ the sound that's played. It makes it more precious. It requires a substantive amount of effort to create or duplicate. CDs were like this too, for a while. When everyone had a burner and you could fit 650MB of MP3s on them, the magic faded. The CD was just a vehicle, not the song itself. The songs could be downloaded and shared trivially. If you wanted a song on tape, you had to buy it or find someone that had it and make a copy in a slow manual process. The closest we've ever come to reclaiming this magic, IMO, is HitClips.

rchaud 8y ago
The thing with a cassette, aside from its physical tangibility, is that it's time-boxed, with no track skipping. Vinyl has the same appeal. The point of it is that you have a physical document of a recording with a clear beginning and end, with the expectation that you listen to it from start to finish. OK, cassettes will pick up where you left off, but you get the idea. It may sound obvious, but in a world with infinitely scrolling feeds and bottomless Spotify/YT playlists, it's practically novel.