I’ll be honest. When cassette tapes started appearing in the shop again around 2018, I thought it was a joke. I grew up with cassettes. I remember the hiss, the warble, the joy of watching your favourite album get eaten by a car stereo. I did not miss any of it.

But here we are in 2026, and I’m stocking more cassettes than I have since the early 90s. Something has changed, and I think it’s worth understanding what’s actually going on rather than dismissing it.

It’s Not About Sound Quality

Let me be clear from the start: nobody is buying cassettes because they sound better. They don’t. Even the best cassette, recorded on high-bias tape with Dolby noise reduction on professional equipment, sounds worse than a CD, worse than a well-mastered digital file, and significantly worse than a good vinyl pressing.

Cassettes have limited frequency range, inherent tape hiss, speed inconsistencies, and channel imbalance. The format has genuine, measurable audio limitations that no amount of nostalgia can overcome.

So why are people buying them? Because cassettes aren’t competing on sound quality. They’re competing on accessibility, DIY culture, and price point.

The DIY Angle

This is where the cassette revival makes sense to me.

A Melbourne band in 2026 has three options for physical releases:

Vinyl: Minimum 300 units at most Australian pressing plants. Cost: $2,500-$4,000 for a basic LP. Turnaround: 4-6 months if you’re lucky. That’s a massive financial commitment for a band that might sell 150 copies.

CD: Still available but culturally irrelevant for most independent music audiences. Young listeners don’t own CD players. The format carries a stigma of being uncool that vinyl never acquired.

Cassette: You can dub 50 copies on decent tape stock using a dual-deck recorder for about $200 total. You can design and print J-cards at home. You can have tapes ready for your next gig in a week. If they sell, you make more. If they don’t, you’re out $200, not $3,000.

For bands operating at the grassroots level—playing small venues, building audiences of 50-200 people per show—cassettes make perfect economic sense. They’re cheap to produce, easy to transport, and priced to sell at gigs ($10-$15 versus $35-$45 for vinyl).

What’s Selling in the Shop

The cassettes moving through our shop fall into three categories.

Local band releases. These are hand-dubbed or small-run professional duplications, usually limited to 50-100 copies. The artwork is often hand-printed or photocopied. The music is typically punk, noise, experimental, or lo-fi indie—genres where the cassette’s limitations actually suit the aesthetic. A fuzzy garage punk recording sounds appropriate on cassette in a way it doesn’t on pristine vinyl.

Label compilations. Labels like Bedroom Suck Records and Vacant Valley put out curated compilations on cassette that function as sampler packs for their roster. Buy the tape for $12, discover five new bands, then follow up with their vinyl releases if you connect with the music.

Nostalgia purchases. Major labels have noticed the trend and started releasing mainstream albums on cassette. Taylor Swift on cassette. Billie Eilish on cassette. These sell, but they’re a different market entirely—they’re merchandise for fans, not a music format choice.

The Quality Problem

Here’s my concern. Cassette quality varies wildly, and most buyers don’t know enough about the format to tell good from bad.

A properly dubbed cassette on fresh Type II (chrome) tape, recorded at the correct level with clean heads, sounds perfectly acceptable. Not great, but acceptable. It captures the music faithfully within the format’s limitations.

A poorly dubbed cassette on cheap Type I (ferric) tape, recorded too hot or too quiet on a worn machine, sounds terrible. Muddy, hissy, distorted, and genuinely unpleasant to listen to.

Most of the hand-dubbed tapes I see from local bands fall somewhere in the middle. They’re listenable but clearly compromised. The bands don’t always know how to optimise the recording process, and they’re using whatever decks they can find—often decades-old machines that need maintenance.

I’ve started being more selective about which cassettes I stock. If it sounds bad, I won’t put it in the shop, even if I love the band. There’s no point selling someone a cassette that’ll put them off the format, or worse, put them off the band.

Should You Care?

If you’re a vinyl collector, probably not. Cassettes aren’t going to replace vinyl in your listening habits, and the audio quality gap is real.

If you’re a music fan who goes to local gigs and wants to support the bands you see live, then yes. A $12 cassette at the merch table puts money directly into the band’s pocket—more money per unit than streaming will generate in years. You get a physical object, some artwork, and a recording of music you enjoyed. That’s a fair exchange.

If you’re a musician, cassettes might be the most practical entry point into physical releases. They’re low-risk financially, they’re quick to produce, and they demonstrate a commitment to your craft that a Bandcamp page alone doesn’t convey.

My Prediction

The cassette revival isn’t going to reach vinyl’s scale. The ARIA numbers show vinyl sales growing year on year while cassette sales remain tiny in comparison. There’s no mainstream infrastructure—no cassette pressing plants (just duplication services), limited retail presence, and no equivalent of Record Store Day driving consumer interest.

But cassettes have found a sustainable niche in the DIY and underground scenes. They’re punk in the original sense of the word: cheap, accessible, and independent of industry infrastructure. That’s not nothing. That’s actually quite something.

I’ll keep stocking them. The good ones, anyway.