Why I Quit Streaming And Got Back Into Cassettes

Whenever I tell people I’m getting back into tapes, their faces immediately light up. There’s a genuine excitement in peoples’ expressions these days when I mention physical media. Lately I’ve been talking about the cheap walkman I bought on a recent trip to Tokyo, and the various little shops where I hunted for music on cassettes. Unlike in Europe and the US, physical media never went out of vogue in Japan, and many people still have a strong preference for shopping in-person. This made Tokyo the ideal place to rediscover my love of portable analog music. I searched through racks of tapes stacked on top of an old piano in a back-alley store on the edge of Shimokitazawa, a neighborhood known for thrifted fashion and oddball record shops. On recommendation from a friend-of-a-friend, I checked out a specialist shop on a sleepy street in Nakameguro, where cassettes easily outnumbered vinyl records 10-to-1. Almost always, I steered myself toward local artists whose names I didn’t recognize. Sometimes, I bought tapes based on the cover art or description alone. Most second-hand music stores in Tokyo keep everything sealed in plastic, so you either have to bother the shopkeep, or just trust your gut and take a chance. This kind of music discovery delights people when I describe it to them. Sometimes they start telling me about rediscovering their old CD collection, or wanting to track down an old iPod Classic to experience their music library away from the surveillance and excess of big tech platforms. Maybe it’s just because I live in a particular social bubble in a particular countercultural pocket of New York City. But recently, the conversations I’ve had on this topic have got me feeling like the culture of music is shifting. People are leaving Spotify , and those who aren’t seem embarrassed about using it. Major artists in protest of the company’s pulled their music off the platform this year and connections to ICE recruitment ads , and posting your Wrapped stats has gone from a ubiquitous year-end pastime to a cultural military drones faux pas . Many folks are . They’re sick of giant corporations, algorithmic playlists, and an sick of streaming in general . Artists are tired of tech platforms that pay them virtually nothing, owned by degenerate billionaires that see all human creativity as interchangeable aesthetic wallpaper, valued only for its ability to make numbers go up. Everywhere I go, internet infested with AI slop , desperately wanting to reconnect with something real. people are exhausted by the never-ending scroll My own path to re-embracing physical media unfolded in stages. Last year, I canceled my Apple Music subscription and started exclusively listening to music I bought from artists on Bandcamp. I still have a large mp3 library, and I thought about setting up a self-hosted media server to stream everything to my phone. But ultimately, I got lazy and wound up just listening to albums I downloaded from the Bandcamp app. Then I ran out...

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