What’s old is new again: in fashion, in pop culture, and, apparently, in music technology.

The humble cassette tape is having a resurgence driven by Gen Z listeners, per Bloomberg.

• Major artists like Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa, and Kendrick Lamar release new music on cassette tapes for superfans who want a physical memento.
• Cassette tapes are cheaper than other physical formats: A new vinyl record can cost up to $35, while a cassette is closer to $10.
• Gen Zers, with a penchant for outdated tech, are drawn to the nostalgia of cassettes.

While cassette sales today are nowhere near the 450m units sold in the US in 1988, there were 436k+ units sold in 2023, up from just 81k in 2015, according to Luminate Data.

Record sales

Cassettes aren’t the only retro music tech making a comeback.

Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department sold 1.64m physical units in the first week of sales, including 859k vinyls, 759.5k CDs, and 21.5k cassette tapes.

Brands have taken notice of fans’ old-school inclinations:

• Bang & Olufsen recently introduced the $55k+ Beosystem 9000c, a revived version of its ‘90s-era CD players. (It did the same with its Beogram 4000 turntable in 2020.)
• China’s Guangzhou FiiO Electronics Technology Co. launched CP13, a portable cassette player, in March.

And vinyl — the reigning champ of physical media — has even entered the restaurant and bar scene, with listening bars becoming a new trend.

The nostalgia for outdated tech is interesting given that most Gen Zers weren’t even alive for these trends, let alone old enough to dance around with a Walkman.

But when that tape gets tangled, will they realize what they’ve got with limitless streaming straight from their phones? Maybe.

Netflix said goodbye to its DVD-by-mail service — the concept that started the media empire — in September, finally becoming a fully streaming service.

But Netflix once made a very brief attempt to break its DVD biz off into a separate entity called Qwikster.

What happened?

When Netflix launched in 1997, there was no streaming, only a DVD rental business where customers could have titles shipped by mail.

By 2011, Netflix had a streaming platform, but it offered a limited selection that most people had to watch on a computer or tablet. Its early TV hits — “Orange is the New Black” and “House of Cards” — wouldn’t premiere until 2013.

That July, then-CEO Reed Hastings announced that streaming and DVDs had become “two quite different businesses,” with varying cost structures and marketing needs. So, instead of paying $10/month for both streaming and DVDs, it’d be $8/month each or ~$16/month for both — a 60% hike.

People were angry

While investors were initially into the idea, subscribers were very much not.

In September 2011, Hastings announced that there would actually be two different businesses: Netflix as a streaming service and Quikster for DVDS, each requiring its own logins and payment methods.

Unsurprisingly, customers hated this, too; NPR compared it to the famous flop New Coke.

By October, Netflix pulled the plug on the whole thing. That quarter, it lost ~800k subscribers, and its stock sank 30%+ on the news.

At the time…

… Daniel Indiviglio, then a journalist with The Atlantic, wondered if Netflix had hoped to sell Qwikster, but found no interested buyers and instead decided to continue service until “its streaming company is robust enough that few use DVD-by-mail anymore, and it can shutter the operation.”

Speculation aside, that’s… pretty much what happened. Netflix just tried to go too fast, too soon.