They were never as cool as vinyl but were perfect for creating a mixtape for a teenage crush or recording the charts on a Sunday night. Now cassettes are making a comeback. Britons are expected to buy more than 100,000 tapes this year for the first time since 2003, when Dido’s Life For Rent was the UK’s bestselling album. Figures from the Official Charts Company show that 65,000 cassettes were bought in the first six months of 2020, twice as many as last year. Gennaro Castaldo at the BPI, the umbrella group for UK record labels, said: “Cassettes remain just a fraction of the UK’s overall music consumption, but they are also showing the fastest growth, albeit from a very low base.

Source: The Times July 21, 2020 23:03 UTC