Minutes after MadCity Music Exchange opened its doors, in walked Andy Dewar. He made a beeline for a small yet colorful display of new cassette tapes and perused titles as diverse as the first White Stripes album and the latest from Minneapolis psychedelic rockers Cult of Lip.
“I’ve been waiting for this day,” Dewar, 52, told me after he snagged three tapes to celebrate Cassette Store Day, including two exclusive CSD titles from late-’60s R&B/soul singer Brenton Wood. “There’s something cool about cassettes. They’re fun to touch and fun to play.”
Modeled after Record Store Day but with nowhere near the same amount of public anticipation and devotion, Cassette Store Day, which this year fell on Oct. 14, began in the United Kingdom in 2013 and is now celebrated by independent record stores worldwide.
Some Madison stores appeared not to bother, but MadCity Music bolstered its supply of new tapes for Cassette Store Day and also set out a couple hundred used tapes.
“Cassette sales, new and used, are a small percentage of what we do, but they add a certain character to the store we are glad to have,” says Dave Zero, who owns MadCity Music. “They’re fun, cheap and still give music fans a real tangible experience while listening to music. Cassettes are still ‘albums,’ just on another format. You can still experience a collection of songs that have a context with a beginning and an end. It’s not the pointless endlessness of streaming songs without any real connection of why they were put together in the first place.”
Cassettes cost less to make and less to buy. Depending on the artist and label, they might even come with a digital download. Burger Records in Fullerton, Calif., built its reputation on cassettes, and Father John Misty and Deerhoof have included cassettes as pre-order bonuses for fans. New tape players can cost as little as 10 bucks, Zero says, and you can find an old Sony Walkman in thrift stores.
“The CD player in my car doesn’t work but the cassette player does,” says Peter Lindblad, 50, who walked out of MadCity Music on Cassette Store Day with three new tapes, two used LPs and a large cassette storage box. “I’m buying new stuff and rediscovering all this old music I haven’t listened to in years.”
Rare Plant is a cassette-only label in Madison with about 30 titles. “We dub all the tapes ourselves, which reduces cost and allows us to do lower-quantity releases, something that is impractical to do through a tape duplication company,” says Erick Fruehling, Rare Plant’s founder. “The cassette direction allows us to do a high volume of releases on a low budget.”
Garage rockers and punks are driving renewed interest in cassettes, although Bobby Hussy, a veteran of many bands including the The Hussy and Fire Heads, contends tapes never disappeared. They “just went into hiding in the underground,” he says.
“I think the appeal of the tape is that it’s something you can have on your merch table for five to seven bucks, and it’s something someone can more easily afford and quickly stuff in a pocket,” says Hussy, who also runs Kind Turkey Records, a small Madison label that releases a few titles on tape every year. “It’s easy to carry around at the show, and if you throw a download code in, it’s a no brainer for fans. They can get a physical product and files for their iPhone.”
Paul Smirl, a Madison-based musician and Isthmus scribe, recently released I Love You All To Death, by his acoustic project Vein Rays, on cassette with expansive interactive artwork.
“Tapes lend themselves to customization, design and personalized packaging,” he says. “Cassettes are a do-it-yourself medium that are collectible, tradeable and, when done right, can sound great. With digital streaming dominating, artists have to grow and develop their own ways of putting out physical releases. For some, that may be cassettes; for others, that might be a jump drive with music saved on it; for someone else, that might be a painting with a download code. It’s all about taking ownership of your release and putting out cool stuff.”
As Rare Plant’s Fruehling says: “If you are listening to and supporting a band, it doesn’t matter what format it is in.”
