There are few things more iconic than the boombox. The boombox bridged the gap between the home stereo and the walkman and it did it with style. You could bring one with you everywhere you went and blast your music through a set of powerful speakers instead of being limited to a pair of headphones. […]
My parents had the coolest stereo set up in our living room when I was growing up. Two huge hi-fi speakers, an amp, a receiver, a turntable with an arm that allowed you to stack about five records so a new LP could drop down as the one before another ended. The pièce de resistance […]
Any nascent musical genre spreads through word of mouth initially. Before the suits would come in and commodify a sound, you’d have buzz on the streets and — in past decades, anyway — DJs unearthing the hottest underground tracks. That was even truer for hip-hop than most genres. It was thoroughly rooted in live communal […]
By Brent Greissle, Discogs’ Discography Specialist Back by popular demand, I’ve been coerced into returning to my most talked about blog post, the time I shouted “Cassettes Suck” from behind a megaphone into a crowd and was met with righteous indignation. As predicted, a fair percent of readers never bothered to read beyond the title […]
If you’re one of those nostalgic hipsters or old-school heads collecting cassettes, thank National Audio Company. The Missouri-based business has been family-owned and operated since 1969, and today it turns out more than 10 million cassettes a year. It’s the world’s leading cassette duplicator and soon to be perhaps the only manufacturer of musical-grade magnetic […]
Or: Using The Discogs Blog As A Bully Pulpit To Talk About The Cassettes I Desperately Need And Will Pay Unseemly Amounts Of Cash For I can’t imagine that I’m the only one. A few weeks back, I dug through the mounting detritus in my basement and pulled out a box filled with upwards of […]
When you walk through the doors of Guestroom Records in Louisville, Kentucky, the tapes are quick to greet you. Located at the front of the store directly underneath the check-out counter, our humble cassette catalog tends to hover at roughly 5% of the store’s album inventory. The selection is small but well-balanced between primarily indie […]
By Zack Taylor, director of Cassette I drive a 20th century car, but just barely. It’s a 1999 Plymouth Voyager minivan that I inherited from a friend. It squeaks a little when I step on the gas, but the tape deck functions like new. Today I mask the engine’s squeal with a tape from Opening […]
I feel like a terrible dirty hipster. I can’t believe I’m actually writing a post about cassettes. I have maybe two or three crates at most, which is way too many dirty, cracked, and gross cases. While creating this list, I realized I haven’t actually been adding many of them to Discogs either. This just […]
