5 ms·

I quite honestly don't understand why. Even if its sound quality was subpar to modern media, vinyl at least had a distinct advantage with its XL-sized cover art

• photonerd 3y ago
  Nostalgia, retro fashion, etc. Vinyl and tape are also enjoyably tactile.
• gyulai 3y ago
  The advantages that initially motivated cassettes over vinyl back when cassettes were invented are basically still valid, for example that you can't have a vinyl-based "walkman", and that they're economical to record onto, while pressing short runs of vinyl is not economical. Indie acts have often gravitated towards CD-R rather than vinyl, because they can burn them at home in small quantities. But for mobile use, a walkman actually beats a discman, in my opinion, due to its smaller size. And, not being digital, cassettes have a kind of built-in "soft" DRM feature, in that reproduction is possible but goes hand-in-hand with a loss in quality. The mixtape / pirating / bootlegging scene helps spread the message about an act, and, if someone truly likes the music, they might go back to the original artist and buy an "official" prerecorded cassette where they get better sound quality, and a reasonable level of expectation that the money actually reaches the artist to support them. With Spotify, for example, I have no idea, as a consumer, if I listen to a lot of small acts, how much of the money I pay every month to Spotify actually gets into the pockets of those acts, or whether they're just on there because they got arm-twisted into being on the platform because of platform power. There's a lot that's good about the medium, and that goodness comes in the form of simplicity in engineering, which is a virtue in its own right.
  • zokier 3y ago
    > With Spotify, for example, I have no idea, as a consumer, if I listen to a lot of small acts, how much of the money I pay every month to Spotify actually gets into the pockets of those acts You can assume it is pretty much a rounding error what they get.
    • JohnFen 3y ago
      Yep. This is part of why I don't use streaming services. I prefer to buy the music directly from the musicians when I can, or go through something like Bandcamp if that's what the musician wants to do. I end up with the music, the musician ends up with most of the money, everybody wins.
  • olah_1 3y ago
    > cassettes have a kind of built-in "soft" DRM feature, in that reproduction is possible but goes hand-in-hand with a loss in quality Not just reproduction. Even just listening to them a bunch goes hand-in-hand with a loss in quality. Unplanned obsolescence?
• Atheros 3y ago
  The number of people who enjoy music is and always has been lower than the number of people who find it useful to use music as a pretext for socializing. Tape is easier to carry and lend to friends than vinyl. Tape can be recorded by home users and vinyl cannot which means that making a mix tape and sharing it with people is possible with tape but not vinyl. The physical properties of tape make it much better for socializing than digital files or streaming services because it forces in-person interaction. That's what people were actually enjoying throughout the 20th century, we all just lived in a collective fantasy that it was music that people were after when it wasn't quite that after all.
  • andyferris 3y ago
    I feel culture is meant to be shared. I remember watching TV shows in the 90s and discussing each episode with friends. It was great. Or you could rent a video movie and watch it with friends (amortising the cost). Mix tapes were also great gifts. I dunno, the tech was technically inferior but it just worked out nice somehow.
    • stevezsa8 3y ago
      I know what you mean about discussing TV shows or music with friends. At school, me and my bestie at the time would quiz each other on the previous night's episode of Star Trek. How lame we were :]
    • JohnFen 3y ago
      > Mix tapes were also great gifts. I recognize, in hindsight only, that every woman I'd dated seriously has received a mix tape from me. Well, in the old days it was a mix tape. These days it's more likely to be a CD or a thumb drive. But it's the same thing in the end. I think it's a way of revealing a more intimate part of myself. Kind of "you should know who I am, and here is an important part of that" kind of thing.
• grose 3y ago
  Way easier to record compared to vinyl and its “poor” sound quality is a feature not a bug for lofi/ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ artists
• KineticLensman 3y ago
  One other feature not mentioned in other comments yet is that when you stop the tape, you can move it to another device and playback will continue from the same point
• zokier 3y ago
  Post-modernismn and nostalgia are large factors. Overall I think the idea largely is that instead of considering the media just an imperfect vessel to carry the artwork, it is instead made into part of the artwork itself. In visual arts I think there is longer tradition of playing with the imperfections of the media instead of trying to hide them. But ultimately, trying to reason about art has its limits, not everything can be understood (or at least enjoyed) rationally.
• Parae 3y ago
  I released my last album on tape cassette. It's easy, fast and super cheap to produce, so you can sell it at gigs for few euros or even give them for free. Fans are likely to buy some merchandising to support the artists they like and they don't really want to spend 15€ for a vinyl when they already paid for an entrance. Cassette tape also have that crispy, muffed but hot and softly saturated sound. I also like sometimes to record my synthesizers direct to tape with a Yamaha MX4T (a 4-track cassette recorder).
• tokai 3y ago
  >Even if its sound quality was subpar to modern media For some genres that's the point. Most modern black metal is released on cassette tape, to achieve the desired black metal sound.
  • makz 3y ago
    The effect can be achieved with saturation and lo-fi plugins. But yeah, I get it.