Why the Cassette Tape Is Still Not Dead

On a mid-January morning in Springfield, Mo., a tractor-trailer backs up to the National Audio Company’s loading dock and unloads more than 600,000 empty compact cassette shells from factories in China and Saudi Arabia. The shipment is added to a warehouse inventory of another 10 million or so of the multi-colored, plastic cartridges awaiting tape inside the country’s largest cassette manufacturer. About 50 workers, including recording engineers and graphic artists, assemble up to 100,000 preordered tapes a day to satisfy demand for a product that might otherwise seem obsolete. “Most people would probably think there aren’t 100,000 cassettes left in the world,” National Audio’s owner Steve Stepp tells me. “I’ve got an order of 87,000 going out today.”

Housed in a six-story brick structure that once produced another relic — the agricultural horse collar — National Audio has managed to stay solvent selling blank and spoken-word tapes. During the Nineties, as the industry moved to compact disc, the company bought up much of the idle cassette-making machinery around the country for pennies on the dollar. Then they waited for a cassette revival that almost no one else saw coming.

“There are two reasons why we stuck in there,” says Stepp, casually dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt. “One is stubbornness and one is stupidity. I’m a very stubborn person and I’m a very optimistic person. The stupidity part is we didn’t know the cassette was dead. We were told it was dead and we never believed it. We just hung in there long enough. And we know that the market is what we thought it would be. It’s come back.”

Last year, National Audio sold about $5 millions worth of cassettes, a 31 percent increase in sales from the previous year. Seventy percent of the firm’s business comes from independent labels and largely unknown bands, but a number of majors are following the trend. Sony, Capitol, Disney, and Universal Music Group all have made orders on behalf of some of their larger clients; National Audio even manufactured a cassette for Justin Bieber last year.

The plant also makes tapes for Nirvana, Keith Richards, Judas Priest, Ice Cube and Weezer, among others. It made 25,000 cassettes for the recent release of a seven-song demo Metallica recorded in 1982, “No Life ‘Til Leather.” The company’s in-house graphics department replicated drummer Lars Ulrich’s original handwriting and artwork for the cassette that is now fetching up to $50 on eBay. “We love the majors, and that’s where you do your big volume, but we would not be here doing what we’re doing if not for the indie band,” Stepp says. “Indie bands are responsible for this return.”