The Cassette Comeback Keeps Country Coming

Listening to country radio as a kid with my dad is where my love for country music came from. And while I loved hearing country music in the car, nothing beat having your own copy of the songs that you could play anytime you wanted 

There were two places that helped shape and expand my taste in and love of music. Sun Ray Records and Poco Music in my hometown of Seneca, South Carolina. Sun Ray Records was the place in town where you could go and play the records in the store, and at my age, I didn’t have a lot of money to buy them, so that’s how I got to hear a lot of music. Poco Music, once I earned grass cutting money and got a real job, is where I would buy my cassettes. You couldn’t play vinyl in the car, and taping songs from records or the radio was just way too much work. Besides, the equipment needed might as well have cost a million dollars to a young teenage music lover. 

I can still see Poco Music. All the cassettes were in locked racks, and you could flip through them to find the ones you wanted. They were in big plastic covers that had a key to unlock and remove the cassette before you could buy it. They would put a sticker on the cassette with the date you bought it, and you would have a week’s warranty if anything happened. Buying music was such an accomplishment for me and riding down the road listening to my music on my terms was just the best feeling ever. 

This walk down memory lane does have a point. Just like vinyl has made a comeback, so have cassettes. According to Isina.com, an online services platform for professional musicians, 436,400 new cassettes were sold in 2023.  

While country music fans haven’t quite caught on yet, certain audiences have. Popular cassette releases include Taylor Swift, the soundtrack to “Guardians of the Galaxy, Nirvana, and Metallica. As we enter 2025 more artists, such as Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, and Ed Sherran, are now entering the game by releasing music on cassettes.  

And with cassettes comes cassette players. 

According to Cognitive Market Research, cassette players sales topped $2 billion worldwide in 2022, with projections of $2.5 billion by the end of the decade. There are a lot of choices available as well. Crutchfield music has a twin deck cassette player for $499.00, and retrospekt.com sells a retro-styled-but-new Sony Walkman with AM/FM and skinny little headphones for $249. 

As a music collector, I never gave up on cassettes. I didn’t have a lot of my original collection left heading into my adult years, but I started, more than 10 years ago, adding to my cassette collection. Estate sales, yard sales, and friends who had them and want them to go are significant sources, and I’m the guy who takes them. As my collection grows, it’s full of George Strait, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, and George Jones. I also have a ton from the ‘90s, the period when cassettes were being replaced by CDs. I’m still finding Trisha Yearwood, Brooks & Dunn, and Vince Gill on cassette. 

With the return of things like film cameras, vinyl records, and now cassettes, the old saying seems to hold true. 

Everything old is new again.