How do you consume your music? What format do you listen to it on? Technology now allows us to stream and download our favorite songs through websites and apps, and we could enjoy them whenever and wherever we like. So it's surprising that the popularity of some old technology is increasing.
A number of musicians have been releasing (发行) their music on cassette tape. While it lacks the good sound quality that we expect to hear today, it was once a popular way for teenagers to enjoy recorded music. The introduction of the Walkman portable cassette player in 1979, made by Sony, meant people could listen to music on the move for the first time. By the end of 1989, 83 million tapes had been bought by British music fans, but the invention of the CD in the 1990s changed that.
Though the cassette tape declined in the 1990s, in the first six months of 2020, nearly 65,000 music cassettes were sold in the UK, double the sales from the same period the previous year. Although this is only a small part of overall music sales, cassette tapes are physical articles that can be kept and collected-not stored in the cloud. And the reappearance of the cassette has been helped by big names like Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber, who have released their music on this format.
To listen to music on a cassette, you need a tape player, but this hasn't discouraged the new younger audience. Gennaro Castaldo from the British Phonographic Industry told the BBC, "Younger consumers are now buying into their collectable appeal, and the more they do this, the greater the demand for record companies and artists to cater to." But although cassettes won't replace streaming as a way of listening to music, it does go to show how some technology never dies!
