Cassettes are making a return thanks to younger generations

SALT LAKE CITY — Some of us had hundreds of cassettes because they were the most portable way to listen to music. And then it wasn’t, and they just went away.

However, Gen Z and Millennials are leading the way to bring back the compact cassette.

At Groovacious Records in Cedar City, owner Lisa Cretsinger said they had a busy Black Friday, selling 30 audio cassettes.

“A lot of people, all ages, are looking for cassettes nowadays, and they come in and clear out my cassettes a lot, it seems like,” she said.

Cretsinger said she chats with her customers at checkout, and almost every transaction feels like a personal conversation, so she hears why they want an outdated format.

“I think they’re having fun. They’re playing them. They’re getting crazy little players, or their grandma gave them something, or they have a car that still has a tape player, which is possible,” Cretsinger said.

One of those customers is Sky Yazzie, from Flagstaff, who, as a kid, listened to Whitesnake on his Sony Walkman on the school bus.

“I also had Boys to Men, Candy Man and Vanilla Ice,” Yazzie said.

They’re the cheapest music you can get that’s physical, not streamed.

Billboard says cassettes surpassed LPs as the most popular format in 1984, when we all went Walkman; then CDs took over in 1991.

Vinyl retook the number one spot in 2022. But cassettes, at a fraction of the price, are coming back. Taylor Swift’s latest album came out on a glittery cassette for twenty bucks, cheaper than the LP and more than the CD.

A blank Maxell 90-minute metal cassette sold on eBay last week for $59.95. While the medium of the ’80s is coming back, it wasn’t perfect back then.

“I remember you would hear kind of a squeal, and you would put, you hit the eject button and you would pull the cassette out, and the little ribbon was everywhere,” Yazzie said.

But you could wind the tape back in with a pencil. So it might be worth a trip to your attic to find some.