WHY I DECIDED TO START COLLECTING CASSETTE TAPES IN 2019?

ft,The first cassette tape is a very important step in someone's life!

For the past few years, you may have heard of my music collection on my main blog, it basically consisted of CDs and DVDs, a pretty normal collection... Up until now! I decided it was time to go back to my roots and start collecting "analog" formats, such as vinyl and cassete.

At first, I decided to restart my vinyl collection, since I alredy have a quite nice amount that were my mother's and grandpa's back in the days (and now are mine, LOL). Anyways, this is not about records, so we're going to leave it for another post.

After watching A LOT of videos on YouTube of fellows music collectors that have cassettes in their collection, I thought I had to get into it as well. Here, my friends, starts my journey build my own analog music collection.

READ MORE: The Art of Collecting Music

But before I start telling my story, I fell like telling outsiders how cassette cameback. We owe it to two things, basically: indie music and movie soundtracks. The US and the UK have an amazing and large undergound scenario for music. Most of those artists, release their works in cassette, and nowadays, many movies have their soundtracks available in the format, but Bohemian Rhapsody is the one to blame for the cassette explosion in the last year.

So, let's talk about what matters: how I got into cassettes. My first plan was actually to make mixtapes in the old sound system in my kitchen, that have a cassette deck and listening to them in a "walkman" I bought on AliExpress as I built my original albums collection (mind you they are not as easy to find in my city).

I bought some blank tapes and went home hapily and waited for the walkman to be delivered. Then I tested the system to see if it still works. It did not. A very important part of the mechanism had oxidated. So, for now, I had a few blank tapes, a broken player, and a walkman I bought online and couldn't see if it's good or not.

So, I decided I would invest in another deck there was on AliExpress. I bought a portable radio that's also a recorder. In the month it took to arrive, I had no music on tape to enjoy at all. However, a few weeks before it came, one of the best things happened: I found some original tapes.

Just to set a scenario: Downtown is the best place in my city to get second hand books, music and books and there's even a square only for those little stores. But, the predominant format they sell is vinyl, it is rare to find cassette because people usually threw they in the garbage once the format was dead. But still, I was able to find only four of them in one store.

I believe those three to the right were from the same owner, because not only they are from the same label (MCA), but they also have a mark in the same spot, a hole that seems like it was melted with one of those things to solder metal.

The tape to the left, O Corpo Se Expressa e Dança, which translates as "the body dances and expresses itself" from portuguese, is part of the material of a ballet course by this guys called Renée. It has great instrumental songs, including All By Myself. It is also the oldest tape I own - it was recorded in 1976!

But my favorite album was actually from this band Walk The Moon. It has the same name of a very famous - and incredible - band from currently, but they are two different groups, but both play rock music. Unfortunately, I think this was their only album, because I wasn't able to find much about them online.

The other great thing happened this day was me finding out that the AliExpress walkman is actually really really nice. I was kind of surprised, but it really delivers great sound quality.

So, the day when the radio arrived finally came. It was another punch in the face, to be quite honest. The radio was really cute for decoration and for radio itself, but has the worse quality when it comes to cassette. It is so bad that makes even the original tapes sound bad, so you can imagine what the recording quality is like...

My own personal saga is not over yet. My next steps are: getting a second hand, decent cassette deck, get more albums on cassette and vynil and telling a little bit more of my journey for you guys. Stay tunned (and don't buy any cassette deck on AliExpress).