Gen Z is crazy for cassettes — and there’s a $3,700 wannabe Walkman

nypost.com:

Tapehead City — noticed that Urban Outfitters had devoted a section to cassettes and their players, he knew that a new generation was getting into the Walkman groove. “The younger kids are getting into cassettes for sure,” Kaplan, 41, told The Post. “Especially with these bigger pop artists like Taylor Swift selling crazy amounts of tapes.

I mean, I don’t think there’s, like, 40-year-old dudes buying them.”No doubt — cassette sales are booming again, rewinding the clock back to the boombox era when they ruled as a more portable alternative to vinyl.

After decades in decline with the emergence of CDs and then digital music, cassette tapes — released by the likes of Swift, Billie Eilish and Harry Styles — have experienced a 443% increase in US sales since 2015, according to Luminate data.Following the vinyl resurgence, cassettes are the latest example of young music fans who grew up on downloads and streaming now embracing the physical products of their parents’ generation.

Nostalgic pop culture moments — such as Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink) listening to tapes on “Stranger Things” and Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) rocking out to his Walkman in “Guardians of the Galaxy” — have helped make cassettes hot again.“I read the book ‘Thirteen Reasons Why’ for a school project, and that featured someone who recorded messages on cassette [for others to listen to after her suicide],” said 23-year-old tape collector Zoël Labelle of the 2007 best-seller, which was turned into a popular Netflix series that ran from 2017 to 2020.“I feel like cassettes kind of got forgotten.