Cassettes Triumph In Blind Tests

As our data storage devices grow ever larger (in capacity) and smaller (in size), it may come as a surprise to some people that the humble analog cassette tape is still trundling along in the background. Although sales of music cassettes were down to 700,000 last year, from a high of 442 million in 1990 (RIAA), it is estimated that North America will continue to manufacture 22 million blank cassettes per year over the next several years…

In fact, all of these blanks will be manufactured by the last cassette maker still operating in the States, Lenco PMC Inc. According to the company, the main drivers of demand for cassettes today are audio books for the blind, court recordings and religious messages. For audio books, an inherent advantage of a cassette over CD is that when you remove the tape from one player and put it in another, it continues playing from the same point it stopped at. A particular advantage for blind people is the fact that tapes can be labelled with braille, something that doesn’t work well with CDs.

Cassettes are also very durable, have a higher resistance to temperatures and handling abuse, and the cases are cheaper to manufacture. Also, for tape lengths less than the 70-80 minutes duration of a CD, the cassettes themselves are cheaper to make. However, the demand for cassettes is clearly in terminal decline…it may well be time to upgrade those old mixtapes. For more information on this, check out Victor’s blog.