For people of a certain generation, cassette tapes were a staple of their youth. Music was bought on them and blank ones were used to record favourite songs, providing the format for meaningful mixes to be passed between friends and lovers.
The arrival of digital music and streaming platforms rang the death knell for cassette tapes, with only hipsters and fans of nostalgia keeping the flame alive. However, you would be wrong to believe that the cassette tape is dead and buried: the audio cassette never really disappeared and is very much alive today – even if it is used mainly by police forces for recording interviews with suspects and witnesses.
Admittedly, there are not many producers in the world anymore. In fact, there are only two that make them beyond Asia. One of them, the National Audio Company, is based in the United States; the other – TapeItEasy – is in Milan, providing audio cassettes, paper covers and plastic packaging for tapes.
TapeItEasy is the brainchild of Fabio Lupica and Cristian Urzino, two young men from Catanzaro who now live in Milan. Since 2014, they persist in producing audio cassettes while the whole world has eyes only for digital.
The good old days
"You want to know how we are doing? We certainly do not drive through Milan in a Ferrari," Urzino told Le Soir, "but we live comfortably, both ourselves and our two employees. Who still buys audio cassettes? Some nostalgic customers are fans of this medium. Then there are small record companies that, for their own culture, still like to record on tape, on four tracks and with the band playing live, just like in the good old days. Finally, many independent artists buy them for reasons of profitability."
Typically, an independent songwriter records a song digitally, as an MP3 file, and then, within a second, streams it to a streaming platform. The problem is that to earn €10, the artist needs 3,000 people to download the song, while they only have to sell one audio cassette – in a bar, at a concert, on the street – to earn the same amount of money.
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Even music stars are rushing to use the audio cassette again. Recently, the TapeItEasy guys have been in contact with the Paris-based arm of global entertainment giant Warner Bros, who wants their help in transferring and selling the entire repertoire of French singer Mylène Farmer on audio cassette. Warner Bros has since ordered a large number of blank audio cassettes from the Italian company, 5,000 for each of the artist's albums.
The old cassettes used to be made with chrome magnetic tape, but this was found to be dangerous to humans and the environment. Today, both TapeItEasy in Milan and National Audio Company in Springfield, Missouri only produce audio cassettes with magnetic iron tape. A solid, less polluting tape of excellent sound quality, which is manufactured in Normandy, in the city of Avranches, by the Mulann factory.
