Dust Down Your Sony Walkman, Cassette Sales Are Soaring Again

First it was vinyl, and now it’s cassettes that all the cool kids want, as nostalgia takes over the music world.

It seems both those brought up with endless streaming options and those of a certain vintage who remember them with affection are returning to the humble cassette, helped by the once ubiquitous Sony Walkman appearing in hit movies and tv series.

Sales in both the U.S. and U.K. have hit new highs, with apocalypse series The Last of Us the most recent to bring retro chic to the cassette.

This week, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) reported that cassette sales had increased for 10 consecutive years in the U.K., although to date sales volumes remain much lower than vinyl sales.

The total number of sales have risen from 3,823 in 2012 to more than 195,000 in 2022.

In the U.K. this has been driven by recent releases from artists including indie band Arctic Monkeys, which topped the U.K. billboard for 2022 with sales of their latest release The Car, plus Harry Styles (of course) and Florence + the Machine.

All 20 of the U.K’s biggest-selling cassettes in 2022 were released in that year.

Mark Burgess, founder of Flashback Records, told tv network Sky News that at his North London store cassette sales have “shot up” post-pandemic and he added that the collectability of cassettes makes them attractive to younger generations in particular.

“One thing that’s difficult to do is be a collector of a streaming service, because cassettes are a smaller format, it’s easier to set up a collection. Also, people like to have an album of music that’s sequenced in the way an artist originally intended it to,” he told Sky.

Cassette Comeback Here To Stay

Announcinb the booming sales, Sophie Jones, BPI Chief Strategy Officer and Interim CEO, said: “For many of us growing up, cassettes were a rite of passage as we listened to our favorite artists. So it’s heartening that this once much-loved format is back in vogue, even if still a tiny part of music consumption overall. While streaming is by far the leading format, the renewed popularity of cassettes and vinyl highlights the continuing importance of the physical market and the many ways fans have to consume music.”

Similarly, in the U.S. 2022 sales of albums on cassette tape jumped by 28% to 440,000. That’s up from 343,000 in 2021, according to the U.S. 2022 Luminate Year-End Music Report.

Luminate’s sales, streaming and airplay data is what’s used to compile Billboard’s weekly charts and, while the new figure still only represents 0.44% of the total album sales market, it is nonetheless a robust figure for a format that had been all but written off a few years ago. For example, in 2015 Luminaire registered just 74,000 cassette sales.

In 2022, total album sales across all formats — digital and physical — numbered just over 100 million. Physical album sales, which include CDs, vinyl LPs, cassettes and other niche physical formats, totalled 79.89 million.

Cassettes Led Album Sales

The resurgence follows the longer term rise of vinyl and the re-emergence of specialist record stores, once the weekend hang out of the cool kids and the culturally dispossessed.

Lest we forget, from the early 1980s until the early 1990s cassettes were the format of choice for album sales in the U.S.. In 1989, global annual sales of cassettes peaked at 83 million, with the Christmas number one was But Seriously… by Phil Collins.

By contrast, the top-selling album on cassette in 2022 was the soundtrack to Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 with 17,000 copies sold.

Cassette mixtapes feature prominently in the Guardians’ storylines, and the three Guardians tapes that rank in the year-end top 10 have sold a combined total of over 238,000 units over the duration of their releases.

Top 10 Selling Cassette Albums Of 2022 In The U.S.

1. Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2: Awesome Mix Vol. 2 (17,000 sales)
2. Taylor Swift, Midnights (14,000)
3. Guardians of the Galaxy: Awesome Mix Vol. 1 (13,000)
4. Harry Styles, Harry’s House (11,000)
5. Billie Eilish, Happier Than Ever (8,000)
6. Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Mix, Vol. 1 (8,000)
7. Nirvana, Bleach (7,000)
8. Bo Burnham, Inside (The Songs) (5,000)
9. Bad Bunny, YHLQMDLG (5,000)
10. Ghost, Impera (5,000)

Source: Luminate, for the period Dec. 31, 2021, through Dec. 29, 2022.