Cassettes

Is collecting cassette tapes patrician? They're dirt cheap and almost as fun as vinyl records. Discuss your finds and favorites. Is buying online cheating?

Besides underground/hipster metal this format seems dead, but I'm having a ton of fun 'discovering' albums I wouldn'tve otherwise listened to and playing them in the car and at home while cleaning or cooking. It's so much comfier playing something physical than just streaming it don't you think?

They're patrician for autograph hounds at large music festivals where they could reasonably get 20 albums signed. Especially these days at least half of CD albums are cardboard packaging. And even jewel cases still arent always ideal like if its just some flimsy one page cover insert. The entire cassette cover would at least be slightly more fun.

>mfw trying to think of benefits of buying cassettes
CDs are the far superior cheap format. Cassettes are hipster bait. The only reason to buy one is if the piece of music isn't available on another format.

Which I don't think even exists at least for recent decades with what's legally available. Slsk I assume has literally everything. Every new cassette I've ever seen for years comes with a download code.

My car has a tape deck but no CD player. I could use an FM transmitter to play off my phone but they kinda suck. I got a tape deck for my home stereo for $1 at a garage sale. Sometimes the way the sound quality of a tape has degraded over time only adds to it's aesthetic value. Songs from the Big Chair or Flock of Seagulls Listen for example.

It's also hard to overstate go cheap they can be, I've bought tapes for 10-50 cents that would have cost 20x that on vinyl. Of course there are always the 'I know what I got' sellers who want $25 for a Motorhead tape they will never sell...

I would rather upgrade my car stereo (or just get a car from this side of the year 2000) and use CDs, rather than buy cassettes.

Those are reasons but not inherent benefits. Like if the only thing you had to play albums on was the thing that plays those cylinders.

You're right. The fun part is that I'm listening to a lot of music I wouldn't have otherwise. I've been listening to extreme metal almost exclusively for 10 years or so and I've really been enjoying 80's synth-pop like New Order and Depeche Mode or whatever. I feel more inclined to actively listen to a physical object I've paid money for than one of millions of bands I could instantly hear on the internet. Collecting tapes has greatly expanded my taste in music in a way that some other formats couldn't