Blanks and Postage

Days blending into each other. Holed up in Michigan. An hour or so from Detroit. Life slowed to a crawl.

You start going to thrift stores, out of boredom. Something satisfying about sifting through shelves of outdated electronics and kitchen gadgets no one asked for. You notice an inventory of cassette tapes. Stacks of them, going for a quarter, maybe a dollar if the owner’s feeling gully. But there’s something about the click of the tape sliding in, the clunk of the play button. It’s physical. And it unlocks an avalanche of a million memories.

I grew up surrounded by cassettes. My house was always overflowing with boxes of blank cassettes.

Take a moment to appreciate what the cassette tape represented. Unlike vinyl records, where the sound is physically etched into the surface, cassette tapes used magnetic tape, meaning they could be erased, reused, recorded over. And that changed everything.

With nothing more than a blank cassette and a home tape recorder, people could bring a piece of the recording studio into their own homes. They could record songs off the radio, put together their own mixtapes, curate a soundtrack for a road trip or a special moment. They could capture a live performance and share it with friends.

In the hands of an artist, the studio could now become part of the story because it could live anywhere. Tascam’s four-track machines let artists bypass expensive studios, paving the way for today’s home production. In the eighties, Bruce Springsteen recorded his album Nebraska on a TEAC 144 four-track in his home. Meant as demos, the songs lost their rawness when re-recorded professionally. The cassette’s limitations, its compression, its intimacy, became part of the album’s haunting mood. Now, artists can record anywhere with a laptop or phone. Like Nebraska, the lesson is clear: technology should serve the moment, not the other way around.

For most, two Japanese brands held sway in their imagination as it relates to blank cassette tape brands: TDK and Maxell.

TDK got their start in the 1930s after commercializing ferrite core. A ferrite core is a magnetic core made of ferrite (a ceramic compound) that’s used in electronics to reduce electromagnetic interference. During World War II, TDK produced five million ferrite cores to reduce the weight of the radio receivers used by the Japanese military.

Until the 1950s, listening to the radio was marred by noise and interference, but once ferrite cores came into use, the noise decreased and the sound became clearer. But TDK didn’t invent the cassette tape. They didn’t even produce it until the mid-sixties.

The actual tape was invented by Lou Ottens, who ran product development at Philips, a Dutch electronics outfit. Back in the early ’60s, he was fed up wrestling with clunky reel-to-reel players. One day, he snapped, told his team to make something small, portable, with the tape spools tucked inside a case, shaped like a deck of cards or a pack of cigarettes, something you could slip in your pocket. He pictured journalists using it, or nature nuts recording birds. Philips rolled it out in ’63, and at first, nobody cared. Then Japan started cranking out knockoffs, and it took off.

TDK had been around for thirty years before producing their first cassette tape. But with the cassette tape, TDK became a bonafide consumer label.

Maxell, another Japanese manufacturer, became the preferred label among certain audiophiles and music nerds (read: Deadheads). There was a vibrant “bootleg” scene for Grateful Dead fans, and to them, Maxell was a premier choice. Maxell UDXLII, XLII, and XLII-S cassettes maintained a stellar reputation for quality and commonly used for bootleg recordings.

Tape trading was straightforward. You send me one, I send you one. Deadheads especially got it; they weren’t trying to get ahead, just to share and collect. You’d scan a list, make a pick, send it in the mail. That was it. I don’t know if it would work the same way now, things feel different, but back then, it was just how it was done.

It’s not that Grateful Dead tapes were “free,” but folks shared the cost of sharing music amongst each other. Most people got their copies through B&P, blanks and postage. You’d send someone blank tapes and return postage, and they’d record the show onto your tapes and mail them back. In 1982, if you wanted decent quality, you were buying Maxell UDXL II tapes, which ran about $2.95 each if you found a good bulk deal. Ten tapes meant you were dropping around 30 bucks, plus shipping. The Maxell MX ran a bit more and cost $6.99 apiece. Adjust for inflation, and those prices start to look less attractive.

In the 1970s, the boombox gained popularity in the United States, making it easier for people to play their cassette tapes wherever they wanted. When Sony introduced the Walkman in 1979, our parents got their iPod. By the mid 1980s, blank cassette sales surpassed sales of vinyl. But for the market for prerecorded cassettes, much of its market growth had to do with the availability of tape decks in cars and trucks.

In the early ’90s, component audio equipment was in a technological arms race. Consumers wanted bigger speakers, more power, and sleek, modern designs. Established brands like Sony and Pioneer kept refining their cassette decks, adding dual-well designs, auto-reverse, improved tape heads, noise reduction, extended bass, high-speed dubbing, and CD sync functions.

The cassette cracked the door open for new sounds.

Hip-hop was the big one. Way before rap hit the radio, cassettes were carrying live Bronx party sets. Even today, vintage hip-hop cassettes maintain an enduring appeal. Many rap releases from that era were produced in limited quantities on tape, and the 1990s, a period we associate with the cassette’s ubiquity, actually saw broader distribution on CDs and vinyl, rendering their tapes scarce. Cassettes evoke a powerful nostalgia, and the hip-hop of the ’80s and ’90s resides squarely within that cultural memory. There’s an argument to be made that cassettes are the truest medium for hip-hop, and Gen Z enthusiasts who’ve embraced the cassette as both artifact and aesthetic definitely agree. Vintage hip-hop cassettes can fetch for a pretty penny.

At the height of old school hip-hop, CDs were overtaking vinyl, but folks were recording their CDs onto tapes for on-the-go listening and expected high-quality sound. There remained a lag in car entertainment system manufacturing which meant cars were made with cassette decks even while CDs were exploding in popularity. If you wanted to listen to a CD in your car, you needed a cassette adapter into which you could connect a portable CD player. Manufacturers responded, pushing the format to its peak in terms of fidelity and functionality. Briefly, drivers started to buy pre-made cassettes preferentially over vinyl.

By 1993 or 1994, cassette deck quality had reached its high-water mark. After that, as CDs took over, the industry stopped innovating. If you have a well-made deck from that era and it can be repaired, it will almost certainly outperform anything that came after it.

But the supply for music, especially hip-hop on cassette, complicates the story. Tapes, by virtue of their affordability, were rarely treated as treasures. Their owners weren’t audiophiles preserving them in pristine condition; they were everyday folks, listening, sharing, and, too often, discarding. Even if production numbers were high, many succumbed to wear, neglect, or the trash bin. What remains is a finite resource, cherished by those who understand its value, both historical and personal.

There’s a bit of alchemy and intangibility when it comes to the cassette format. Part of this is due to the relationship between the cassette tape and the cassette deck. For example, among Maxell cassette tapes, their black magnetite offered a solution that was derived from a new formulation process. For many, it was preferred over Maxell’s Epitaxial formulation. However, if your cassette deck is from the 1980s, some audiophiles might recommend epitaxial tapes for your entertainment system. All of these attributes is in regards to obscure chemical processes that might elude the casual music fan.

It’s generally assumed that chemical formulations for cassette tapes evolved to keep pace with improvements in deck technology, so most audiophiles try to match tapes of one particular era with a cassette deck from the same era. Some folks go further, recalibrating modern decks to complement a particular cassette tape. For this, you will need an oscilloscope and proper adjustment tapes to get everything right.

Elsewhere in Japan, there existed room for a high-end cassette tape. Fuji, known for their film stock, produced the FRI-S(uper) in 1985 and it’s remained a particular favorite ever since. For Deadheads, bootleg recordings of their favorite music can often become a means to an end. And that end can involve the music being completely erased. Good blank cassette tapes are getting harder to find, and the prices reflect that. So some people simply buy old tapes just to erase them and reuse the higher-quality tape formulations. Tascam recently released a new line of Type II blanks, and they’re charging $22 for a single 60-minute tape. Metal tapes? They’re not even made anymore.

Check eBay for Maxell MX tapes and see what they’re going for. If stored properly, a well-made tape can last over 40 years without degrading. Sometimes they need to be reshelled if the slip sheets dry out, but the tape itself usually holds up.

So after music moved on, how did the cassette survive at all? Some of the answers to that lie in American persistence.

Springfield, Missouri is home to today’s largest cassette manufacturer in the world, the National Audio Company. The company, which produces about 30 million cassettes a year, started in 1968, a few years after the cassette was first invented. It was founded by Warren Stepp and his son, Steve Stepp. When Warren Stepp passed away in 1994, Steve stepped up to run the company. Steve’s son, Phil Stepp is a chemist who earned his Ph.D. in neuroscience. He would later join the family business at a critical time.

Cassette tapes, if ever a preferred format, were never preferred for their sound quality specifically. By 1991, music CD sales surpassed both vinyl records and cassette tapes. While CDs became the preferred format for music, cassettes stubbornly remained the preferred format for audiobooks. This kept National Audio in business.

Remarkably, National Audio held a somewhat irrational faith in the cassette tape format. As their competitors abandoned the format, National Audio saw a unique opportunity to acquire their competitors’ equipment. God would test their commitment to tape a bit more. After Saehan, a South Korean manufacturer from which they sourced the actual tape itself, stopped producing tape, National Audio bought all of their remaining stock. Expecting this dwindling stock to last little more than three years, they set out to produce tape themselves. This proved to be an enormous scientific project.

Phil Stepp’s scientific background was put to good use. Cassette tape starts as a powder, before it’s blended into a liquid, processed through large pressure pots, coded, and then cut. Numerous disciplines of science are involved: physics, chemistry, magnetic, and electrical engineering. Phil Stepp led a team to devise a recipe, process and machinery to make music quality magnetic tape. The process involved sourcing material from all over the world in a complicated supply chain.

One of National Audio’s tape-coating machines started out decades ago producing audio cassettes. When demand for cassettes declined, it was repurposed to manufacture the magnetic stripes on credit cards. Then, as the industry moved away from stripes in favor of chip technology, NAC acquired the machine and restored it to its original function, bringing cassette tape production back into operation.

In Missouri, the process finally comes together with an assortment of belts and pulleys, large ovens, and an old cigarette wrapping machine.

For customers, fans enjoy the quirky feeling of owning something new in an outdated and obsolete format. Bandcamp, one of the most visited websites for independent artists, helped make cassettes vogue for a younger crowd who didn’t grow up with the format.

Collecting your favorite artists’ work is a bit of an anachronistic pastime. But similar to vinyl records, there’s been a resurgence in analog cassette tapes.

According to Billboard magazine, sales have grown more than 440% in the past decade. Cool, but cassette sales are still a very small fraction of the recorded music retail market, just 0.41% of all albums sold in the US last year. The market for newly produced cassettes is a peculiar one. Taylor Swift’s catalog of albums available on cassette sold 35,500 in 2023. Combined, the cassette sales of the Guardians albums and Swift’s albums totaled 88,000 in 2023, accounting for 20% of all cassette album sales in 2023, ultimately 88,000 of 436,400.

E-commerce allows artists to market just about anything to their community of fans. The cassette spearheaded the very idea of the mixtape and the democratized playlist. Beyond its frustrating technological issues, the tape will likely remain a strong fixture of the underground music scene for many decades to come.

The advantage of cassettes, over vinyl, is that blank cassettes and cassette recording equipment can be acquired and put into “in-house” operation by anyone. Artists can scale production up or down as needed, and freely produce limited releases in a financial model that makes sense. The only problem, which is one that National Audio has somewhat solved for itself, is finding equipment that is still in good working order.

Who’s still making cassette hardware? Good hardware? Only Teac. As a pioneer in high-fidelity audio since 1968, starting with the Teac A-20, this Japanese brand has built a legacy of quality and innovation. And they’re still delivering today with two exceptional models: the Teac W-1200 and the Teac AD-850-SE. For anyone who values craftsmanship and performance, Teac remains a leader in the space.

A lot of folks are manufacturing cassette hardware, but not incredibly well. They look snazzy, modern and clean, but the sound quality is going to be incredibly subpar. There’s a reason for this.

Tanashin is a Japanese audio hardware company. Since the mid-80s, it produced mechanisms, the assembly which transports, plays, and records the tape, for budget boomboxes, portable cassette recorders, and other low-cost devices. In 2009, Tanashin stopped producing the mechanism.

The global manufacturing system, with its beating heart in China’s Guangdong province, has a way of resurrecting the dead. A technology declared obsolete in one decade, cassette players, flip phones, VCRs, finds itself reanimated the next, not through nostalgia-fueled artisanal revival, but through sheer economic inertia. Factories that once served legitimate brands pivot to churning out unbranded or barely branded machines, cobbled together from whatever parts are still in circulation. There’s no parent company, no R&D division, just a constellation of anonymous suppliers fulfilling an order.

And yet, in this ghost economy of outdated tech, there’s something almost utopian: a refusal to let any market die completely, so long as someone, somewhere, still wants to buy in.

Today’s “Tanashin mechanism” that lives on in the form of Chinese-made clones is an unauthorized, but not illegal, replica given the expiration of patents. Virtually any cassette-playing machine being made today (and there are still a fair number of them) uses one of these.

A lot of the intellectual knowhow behind cassette tape technology is slowly fading away. There’s been a diligent effort on the part of aficionados to keep the community alive over the Internet, but this has not been enough to sustain new production. Astute fans have been pushed to pursue vintage equipment at the expense of newer equipment that fails to deliver the same quality of sound and consistently fall short in regards to quality control and long term reliability.

Music sampling and the obsessive hunt for vintage gear both demand a certain kind of cultural scholarship, but only one of these pursuits results in actual human interaction. Sampling is a largely solitary process. An artist digs through old records, isolates a breakbeat, and warps it into something new, all without ever speaking to another person. It’s a conversation with the past, but not necessarily with the people who lived it.

The search for vintage equipment, on the other hand, is an inherently communal act. It’s not just about acquiring old synths or dusty drum machines; it’s about engaging with the people who have owned them, hearing their stories, and becoming part of an unofficial but very real lineage of musicians, producers, and gearheads. Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace aren’t just platforms for commerce. They’re accidental social networks, where negotiating the price of an SP-1200 can turn into a conversation about early hip-hop production techniques or a debate over the superiority of analog warmth versus digital convenience.

Cassette fans can get into the weeds about which particular brand of cassette tape will result in the best sound quality. Similar to vinyl, wine, and art, there’s room for debate and discussion about which tapes and brands are best, but enough time spent in any discipline will usher in prevailing wisdoms and biases. While most opinions may withstand scrutiny, all are deserving of skepticism as they’re rooted in the fallibility of individuals. The act of looking for a deal has, in some ways, become its own art form, an elaborate, self-imposed scavenger hunt where the reward isn’t just the gear, but the unexpected human connections along the way.

The cassette opened the door for hip-hop, which is having a bit of an identity crisis these days. With the internet, crate digging’s turned into something else. AI’s tossing in wild tech possibilities, but the old-school culture of musical scholarship? It’s shifting. If hip-hop was postmodern, what the hell is this era?

For me, real hip-hop’s honesty, its grit, its crate-digging soul, will live on by tapping into tape cultures from non-Western locales, or overlooked American regional scenes. More producers will be sampling from places where state-run radio and music were locked down tight, where cassettes were the workaround. The rebellious spirit of hip-hop has been lacking since corporate America brokered a truce with its richest artists. There still remains a community of music fans eager to dive into the stories of artists who dodged authoritarian gatekeepers, smuggled out protest songs, or distributed dance tracks and wedding jams that were labeled too offensive. The crate diggers of the past are giving way to a new breed: “tape hunters.” These are the new urban journalists, and they’re spending their time scouring bazaars, kiosks, and market stalls across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, chasing musical oddities. These are the icons of the future, where music’s increasing global interconnectedness will continue to shape how we listen to music.

While living in Michigan, I became obsessed with ghettotech and horrorcore. I discovered a YouTube tape rip of Esham’s Red Tape. That, and Raekwon’s Purple Tape, are my cassette holy grails, ones I’d kill to snag and treasure. There’s something about fetishizing music and art like that that matters to the culture. Beyond collecting, the appeal of listening to a cassette is similar to vinyl in the sense that the difference of the experience is precisely the point. As one fan wrote on Reddit, “for a modern audience, in addition to the collector thing, it’s just nice to sit down and listen to sequential media that’s physical and imperfect.”