Four big thoughts about the chunky cassette tapes on the new release shelf

Four thoughts that quickly went through my thick head when I saw the above display at a local store:

1) Oh cool, cassette tapes must be making a comeback. That's nice. Tapes were the way I first heard the music I really loved.

2) They're having a laugh asking forty bucks for Mariah Carey's Christmas album. I'm sure I could get you a copy for 50c down the dump shop, it sold like gangbusters for decades and millions of those tapes are still out there in the world.  

3) Putting the new Phoebe Bridgers album out on tape is probably a great idea, but giving it a flimsy cardboard cover defeats much of the point that these things are an object, a chunky slice of possibly unearned nostalgia, and the extremely resilient plastic covers that the tapes went in is a big part of it. It's bad enough that the new CDs I still buy to listen to in the car come in flimsy carboard covers that quickly rip apart, instead of the sleek plastic of the originals, but if you want people to pay forty bucks for some kind of cultural artifact, you have got to give them some heft.

4) I don't need new tapes, I still got ones that I bought in the 80s, man.