Gen Z is buying old tapes in droves – but doesn’t know how to play them: ‘I struggled’

The streaming generation is trading Spotify for tapes.

But despite Gen Z’s obsession with all things vintage—from rotary phones to Y2K fashion reboots like Ed Hardy and Von Dutch—integrating retro technologies is difficult even for tech savants.

“I struggled a bit,” 26-year-old Amy Campbell, who bought Kacey Musgrave’s album on cassette this year, told the Wall Street Journal.

The Rockford, Illinois resident borrowed her mother’s tape recorder but found it confusing to use. She couldn’t figure out how to insert the tape or change the songs.

“You have to keep fast-forwarding, rewinding, pausing and playing to find the right song you want,” she complained.

But not all Zoomers have the luxury of parents carrying their own Walkmans.

Molly Clark’s 13-year-old daughter bought an Aurora tape but couldn’t play it, forcing Clark, 45, to buy a player on eBay.

“It makes me smile every time I see it because it takes me back to when I was a kid,” Clark told The Journal.

Cassette tapes became almost obsolete at the turn of the century after the CD boom and the introduction of digital music and streaming services, such as Apple Music and Spotify.

But new-age technology hasn’t stopped young audiophiles from listening to music on old-school gear. In fact, tape sales are up, with more than 430,000 sold last year — roughly five times what was sold almost a decade ago, The Journal reported.

Similarly, vinyl sales have soared in recent years, surpassing CD sales in 2023, thanks in part to the fan bases of more popular artists like Taylor Swift.

“It’s a cash cow right now,” Jen Long, a London-based music manager who previously ran a record label, told The Journal. “It’s another format to get you up the list and milk money from people.â€

But Campbell said he likes “how nostalgic it sounds,” while other cassette fans defend the convenience of a Walkman over battery-sucking playback streaming to their smartphones.

Others have been inspired by moments in pop culture, such as movies or television shows that depict characters listening to music or audio tape recordings, such as the cast of Stranger Things.

“I read the book Thirteen Reasons Why for a school project and it featured someone recording messages on tape [for others to listen to after her suicide]- Cassette collector Zol Labelle, 23, previously told The Post.

“It seems to me that the tapes have somehow been forgotten. But when they were unknown enough to be unknown to the younger generation, they became kind of cool,” he continued.

“Being my age, I see a lot of people, a lot of kids who are fascinated by things that are old, like old cameras, t-shirts, comic books.”

But Lou Ottens, the inventor of the tape, is ready to take his idea to the streets.

“People prefer worse sound quality out of nostalgia,” he previously said in the 2016 documentary “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape,” via The Journal.