Gen Z buying vintage cassette tapes en masse — but doesn’t know how to play them: ‘I struggled’

nypost.com:

flip phones to Y2K fashion reboots like Ed Hardy and Von Dutch — the integration of retro technologies is difficult even for the tech savants.“I struggled a little bit,” 26-year-old Amy Campbell, who purchased Kacey Musgrave’s album on a cassette tape this year, told the Wall Street Journal.The Rockford, Illinois, resident borrowed her mom’s cassette player but found it confusing to use.

She didn’t understand how to insert the tape or shuffle through songs.“You have to keep fast-forwarding, rewinding, pausing and playing to find the right song you want,” she lamented.But not all Zoomers have the luxury of parents who kept their Walkmans.

Molly Clark’s 13-year-old daughter bought an Aurora cassette but couldn’t play it, forcing Clark, 45, to buy a player on eBay. “It makes me smile whenever I see it because it just takes me back to when I was a kid,” Clark told The Journal.Cassettes became nearly obsolete at the turn of the century after the CD boom and the introduction of digital music and streaming services, such as Apple Music and Spotify.

But the new-age technology hasn’t deterred young audiophiles from listening to music on old-school devices. In fact, cassette sales are up, with more than 430,000 sold last year — approximately five times more than what was sold almost a decade prior, The Journal reported.