Is The Cassette Making A Comeback After Sales Soar By 19%?

Is the cassette tape making an unlikely comeback after sales rose by almost a fifth last year? And which artists sold the greatest number of cassette tapes in 2021?

There’s a theory – admittedly in the world of fashion – known as ‘the 20-year rule’ to denote the time it takes for something to fall out of favour and return on trend. Think high-waisted jeans and chokers from the 90s or corduroy and white boots from the 70s (all suggestions provided for me – I’m no fashionista).

Well, it appears, in the realm of music, the cassette has achieved almost exactly that, by recording their highest total sales since 2003, new figures today have revealed.

According to the music industry association BPI, with figures sourced from The Official Charts Company, the sale of these hearty plastic shells of analog magnetic tape increased by 19% in 2021 from the previous year to a total of 185,000.

It’s a trend we’ve of course seen in the vinyl trade, which also saw an 11% increase in sales in its 14th consecutive year of sales, to reach a total of 5.3m copies purchased.

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But the cassette tape seems somewhat more peculiar. If the desire for vinyl represents a yearning for the physical – for slowly drawing out an LP from its case like a knight withdrawing his sword, ready to gently lay it down on a record player before the scratch and hiss jolts the track alive, the cassette tape is a slightly different creature.

Small, clunky and prone to technical problems, tapes can often vary between devices, producing different alternations of ‘wow’ and ‘flutter’ (musical terms for sounding a bit odd).

What’s more, a common problem is when weak resistance in the tape path causes the magnetic tape to fall out the bottom from which it can become tangled in the tape player, creating what’s rather poetically called bandsalat (or ‘tape salad’).

So, who are the artists helping stage perhaps the unlikeliest of musical comebacks since Craig David? Here’s the list of top ten selling artists on cassette.

1. Olivia Rodrigo – Sour
2. Dave – We’re All Alone In This Together
3. Lana Del Rey – Chemtrails Over The Country Club
4. Queen – Greatest Hits
5. Coldplay – Music Of The Spheres
6. Wolf Alice – Blue Weekend
7. Billie Eilish – Happier Than Ever
8. Elton John – The Lockdown Sessions
9. Demi Lovato – Dancing With The Devil: The Art Of Starting Over
10. Ed Sheeran – =

Mmm, tape salad.

What’s surprising about such a roster is of course how strikingly modern it is. Olivia Rodrigo, 18, who pulls away in the lead with her album Sour, was barely born since the cassette last enjoyed such popularity, when Now 54 was that year’s biggest seller on the format. (Now 80 came out last November).

Much of this, of course, is down to the artist, who may choose to produce a cassette tape of their work, creating a retro collectable for only some of their most dedicated fans.

Jeffrey Smith, Director of Growth Marketing at Discogs, which listed over one million cassettes on its marketplace for the first-time last year, has previously said the ‘ongoing renaissance’ of the product is down to ‘the inception of Cassette Week’ – a week-long celebration of the medium run by New York-based store Tapehead City.

How much of that is true, and how much of that may have spilled over across the pond to cassette tape sales in the UK, is hard to quantify.

Olivia Rodrigo, whose album Sour was the highest-selling cassette album last year in the UK. Photo: Jon Kopaloff.

In truth, though, despite having just experienced a 9th year of consecutive growth in sales, the number of those who’ve purchased albums on cassette still represents a very small fraction of the UK’s overall music consumption.

It might have risen by 19%, but this increase of around 35,000 is barely a drop in the musical ocean that saw the equivalent of 159 million albums either streamed or purchased last year, which itself was up 2.5% from 2020.

Whether such a rise signifies a genuine desire for the cassette to return remains to be seen.

Instead, what is clear is that Lou Ottens, the Dutch engineer and inventor of the cassette tape, who passed away last year at the age of 94, invented a product that certainly improved the listening experience of music.

Lou Ottens, the Dutch engineer and inventor of the cassette tape, who passed away last year at the age of 94.

And whilst even he had some gripes with his own invention, telling Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad that ‘nothing can match the sound of the CD… I think people mainly hear what they want to hear,’ his humble cassette tape has proven to still catch the eyes (and ears) of music lovers.

Especially if that music is Olivia Rodrigo.