Your correspondent recently went record shopping in L.A.’s trendy Atwater Village neighborhood and discovered that the cool kids have now moved on to cassettes. Again.
This confounded him, and not in the jeeze-I’m-getting-old way. A vinyl resurgence has its obvious advantages: better sound quality, rare cuts that haven’t been reproduced digitally, liner notes full of tidbits that can be dropped during cocktail chatter.
Tapes, on the other hand, don’t have these things. They were conceived as a portable version of the record. Why would you buy a tape when your iPhone carries far more music at far better sound quality? Why indeed.
However, the Kickstarter for Mixxtape is interesting. Imagine a mixtape from your youth made digital, and able to be packed full of your favorite playlists to be streamed via bluetooth, used with headphones or played as a tape in a tape deck.
Pretty neat, especially when you consider that making mix tapes was objectively the coolest aspect of the original cassette era, a void that doesn’t get filled via downloadable playlists.
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