Open Thread: The Joy of Physical Media

This 404 article about ditching Spotify for cassette tapes is very joyful. It made me smile.
#Music #RetroTech
https://www.404media.co/why-i-quit-streaming-and-got-back-into-cassettes/
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— Strange New Words (Adam) (@strange-new-words.tenforward.social.ap.brid.gy) December 25, 2025 at 3:57 AM

Okay, I have a YouTube subscription (I know, you’re shocked), but I have no real ear for music, so I tend to think of cassettes as ‘the fragile crappy media that let us share stuff before CDs were invented’. (On the other hand, Spousal Unit & I are currently working on deadline to transfer approximately 10,000 books / manga / magazines / DVDs from the ‘old’ house to the ‘new’ one, so… )

Janus Rose at 404Media — “Why I Quit Streaming And Got Back Into Cassettes”:

… There’s a genuine excitement in peoples’ expressions these days when I mention physical media. Lately I’ve been talking about the cheap walkman I bought on a recent trip to Tokyo, and the various little shops where I hunted for music on cassettes. Unlike in Europe and the US, physical media never went out of vogue in Japan, and many people still have a strong preference for shopping in-person. This made Tokyo the ideal place to rediscover my love of portable analog music.

I searched through racks of tapes stacked on top of an old piano in a back-alley store on the edge of Shimokitazawa, a neighborhood known for thrifted fashion and oddball record shops. On recommendation from a friend-of-a-friend, I checked out a specialist shop on a sleepy street in Nakameguro, where cassettes easily outnumbered vinyl records 10-to-1. Almost always, I steered myself toward local artists whose names I didn’t recognize. Sometimes, I bought tapes based on the cover art or description alone. Most second-hand music stores in Tokyo keep everything sealed in plastic, so you either have to bother the shopkeep, or just trust your gut and take a chance.

This kind of music discovery delights people when I describe it to them. Sometimes they start telling me about rediscovering their old CD collection, or wanting to track down an old iPod Classic to experience their music library away from the surveillance and excess of big tech platforms. Maybe it’s just because I live in a particular social bubble in a particular countercultural pocket of New York City. But recently, the conversations I’ve had on this topic have got me feeling like the culture of music is shifting.

People are leaving Spotify, and those who aren’t seem embarrassed about using it. Major artists pulled their music off the platform this year in protest of the company’s ICE recruitment ads and connections to military drones, and posting your Wrapped stats has gone from a ubiquitous year-end pastime to a cultural faux pas. Many folks are sick of streaming in general. They’re sick of giant corporations, algorithmic playlists, and an internet infested with AI slop. Artists are tired of tech platforms that pay them virtually nothing, owned by degenerate billionaires that see all human creativity as interchangeable aesthetic wallpaper, valued only for its ability to make numbers go up. Everywhere I go, people are exhausted by the never-ending scroll, desperately wanting to reconnect with something real.

My own path to re-embracing physical media unfolded in stages. Last year, I canceled my Apple Music subscription and started exclusively listening to music I bought from artists on Bandcamp. I still have a large mp3 library, and I thought about setting up a self-hosted media server to stream everything to my phone. But ultimately, I got lazy and wound up just listening to albums I downloaded from the Bandcamp app. Then I ran out of storage on my phone, and the amount of music I had available on-the-go shrank even more.

When I came to Tokyo, a friend took me to a store that sold cheap portable cassette players, and I knew it wouldn’t be a huge leap to take my music listening fully offline. The walkman I bought is unbranded and has a transparent plastic shell, allowing you to watch all the little mechanical gears turning inside as the tape spools around the wheels and past the playheads. It was one of the easiest purchasing decisions I’ve made in recent memory: After years of psychic damage from social media and other phone-based distractions, I was ready to once again have a dedicated device that does nothing but play music…

First musical media I ever bought for myself: A Mary Travers & a Melanie collection (probably bootlegs, in retrospect), from a NYC storefront in the fabric district. First CDs, when one of my post-college roommates invested in one of those new expensive tech-toy players: Barbara Streisand’s THE BROADWAY ALBUM and a German-import Elton John compilation (YOUR SONGS, maybe?). As I said: I am not a sophisticated listener. (But in the human vocal range, CDs seemed like an immense improvement over my cassettes, however cherished. And certainly much easier to deal with physically than vinyl records, even if those *sounded* better… )

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