Cassettes are back. Vinyl never left. Even CDs, of all things, are quietly climbing again.
The convenient explanation is nostalgia. The kids who never owned them are now buying them. The adults who did own them are buying them again. Everyone is supposedly chasing some lost feeling.
I think it's something else.
The truth is that streaming asks nothing of you. You don't choose, you don't sit, you don't flip the side. The algorithm chooses. You consume. The whole loop is designed to be frictionless, and frictionless turns out to be its own kind of poverty.
A cassette asks you to wait. To rewind. To listen in the order someone meant. To sit through a song you'd skip on Spotify, and sometimes find that song is the best one on the record. The format insists you give it time. In return, it gives you something you can't quite name.
People aren't buying cassettes for the sound. They're buying them for the friction. And the friction, as it turns out, is where most of the meaning was hiding.
— Sapere Aude