The cassette section at Fingerprints. Photos by Angela Ratzlaff.
Walking along the left wall that faces rows of CD displays in the 4th St. record shop Fingerprints, two new additions have customers questioning what kids are listening to these days.
The two box-like displays hang on the wall, each coated with a shiny layer of black paint. They feature a number of rectangular slots, each one filled with a plastic-wrapped and appropriately priced cassette tape. Yes, cassettes–that 80s music format that fell out of fashion as soon as compact discs became produced has apparently been making a comeback.
“The catalyst for me was that there was great, compelling stuff coming out for Record Store Day, and I was like, ‘If we are going to have people in and we are going to sell them cassettes, it’s silly for us to not have cassette departments when we have stock,’” Fingerprints owner Rand Foster said.
The shop installed the cassette displays in April before Record Store Day because artists–like the electronic, synth-driven group MGMT–and record labels–like Kill Rock Stars and Burger Records–released special edition tapes for the annual independent record store holiday.
“I’ll give credit where it’s due, Burger Records … they have kind of almost single handedly jump started this thing that I feel like was coming for a long time, but I’ve been resistant to,” Foster said.
The Fullerton-based record label and shop started releasing cassette tapes in 2008 with ’60s-inspired surf-pop group Thee Makeout Party, which was made up of Burger Records founders Sean Bohrman and Lee Rikard. Since then, Burger has put out more than 200 debut albums on cassettes and manages to sell 300 to 500 cassettes a week depending on the artist and the release, Bohrman said.
“We’ve been putting out all kinds of cassettes, it just kind of caught on,” he said. “We are covering all the formats … no one else was making cassettes at the time.”
Bohrman said that producing a cassette is also a cheaper, affordable way for artists to come out with new music, with 250 cassettes costing only $225 compared to 200 CDs costing $500. Some Burger cassette releases include mostly lo-fi, garage rock Southern California groups like acid rockers The Growlers, lo-fi pop artist Colleen Green, surf poppers Cherry Glazerr and punk rock duo The Garden.
“We are kind of forcing the music-buying public to listen,” Bohrman said.
Foster said Fingerprints has been collecting cassettes from customers who were looking to sell or trade their old collections. Once the catalyst and audience for the plastic hand-helds grew, he said he decided it was time to take the cassettes from the back stock and put them on display.
On a good day, the shop may sell about two or three cassettes. However, since the format is such a new addition, Foster said the learning process is still ongoing.
“It’s kind of fun and exciting, as we see things sell, it kind of reinforces our decisions that we made,” he said.
For Long Beach residents like Curtis Stage, the cassette comeback is a surprise, mostly because of the lack of sound quality.
“I think vinyl sounds better,” he said. “I grew up with cassettes. I’m in my 40s; [this generation] never grew up with that. It’s exciting to bring something back that was dead.”
William Ardelean, a high-school student from Long Beach, said he used to listen to cassettes while growing up when he had a cassette Walkman and tapes that were handed down to him from his parents.
{loadposition latestlife}“Physically they are very fun to hold, they are very fun to play with,” Ardelean, who now listens to music mostly through Spotify or Youtube because of convenience and options, said. “And to listen to, they are always kind of interesting because you have the analog control.”
Today, Foster said he sees more kids who have cars that hold cassette decks, which gives this generation more reason to invest in the retro format.
“I think you’d be hard-pressed to go into a stereo store, or whatever passes for one these days, and pick up a cassette player,” he said. “You’d probably find one online. But they are hard to come by.”
Foster said he also has a bias against cassettes, mostly for the poor sound quality when compared to vinyl records.
“Ultimately it’s a cassette, they don’t age well, they oxidize and they stretch. For such a transportable media, they are really fragile,” Foster said. “I appreciate that aspect of it, but do I see a time five years from now when we have a giant cassette department? Probably not.”
Most of the cassettes that Fingerprints sells are used, which are priced at $3.99, and newer releases, which are priced at $5.99 or $6.99, are still limited. Foster said that the record shop just found a distributor to work with, however, and Fingerprints will start carrying more new cassettes than used in the future.
“I think there is a nostalgia for things that are kind of cool, and things that you have to learn about and things that you have to explain to your friends, not everybody has them,” Foster said. “We totally support it. We recognize that at this point, it’s a very small niche, but it’s fun.”
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