2021 - I do think music cassettes are making a comeback. I really do.

However, there's no great in-depth anaylsis to back up my argument - only a gut feeling and a few sales. And this:

CDs these days are a real difficult sale. They are way out of fashion - almost similar to how vinyl was viewed a few years back. I wonder if in time the likes of HMV will stop stocking it in a similar way they stopped cassettes way back when. Certainly if you go to your local HMV you will notice how much bigger their vinyl shelves are getting - inexorably encroaching on the CD space seemingly. I just don't think at the moment people are buying CDs in any sort of meaningful numbers and I don't see that changing any time soon.

Will they come back into fashion? Maybe. Maybe not. I just don't know. But then I never saw the vinyl revolution coming. 10 years ago or so I would look at vinyl as a poor man's CD. How wrong I was. For a start people like the way music sounds on the vinyl and, secondly, as they are so much bigger than CDs then you get the size and power of the artwork the way the designers designed them to be appreciated in the 1970s and before modern technology and the CD usurped them. Size in this case really does matter.

The CD is dead; long live the LP! Oh and the digital download where you get nothing but it sounds good. I'm old skool.

As an aside, the vinyl revival is incredible. And inspiring. If you believe all the propaganda from parties with invested interest in the pushing of the digital download you'd believe that we are all trapped with that souless contraption; that there is no life beyond the invisible. And yet vinyl lives on or even has had a rebirth. Sure the % is small in comparison with its digital noisy neighbour and yet if some of us don't forget the physical format then we can make it grow.

But whatabout the cassette? Another casualty of the rise of the CD. Well I sourced a few recently as they were cheap not expecting anything as I really thought nobody would buy them. But then I sold 1, then another, a few more and a few more after that. So I set up this page to see if there really is a market and will report back here as soon as I have any meaningful news. Oh and spotted a few (and I mean a few) releases on cassette offered by HMV. Could they be seeing a sign of things to come?

It will be great if I was at the forefront of a revival as I like this small, neglected thing. It deserves a life, a little bit of space, in the music world. Never been involved in a revival. But my part would be small. If you are out there then you are responsible for the revival.

I have to say looking at cassettes they are cute. Certainly alot more aesthetically pleasing than the CD. The CD was always an awkward size and the artwork originally made for vinyl lost lots of its power when reduced to CD size. But the cassette was/is so small that it is just cute.

Paul Page, 2020