Gen Z Loves Cassettes. But Wait, How Do These Things Work?

Campbell, a student in Rockford, Ill., borrowed her mom’s tape player but couldn’t figure out which direction the cassette was supposed to go in. Also difficult: finding a tune. 

“You have to keep fast-forwarding, rewinding, pausing and playing to find the right song you want,” Campbell said.The generation that grew up on Spotify is getting a lesson on how people listened to music in the 1980s and ’90s, when mixtape-filled boomboxes fueled parties and Sony’s Walkman was the beating edge of technology. Gen Z is being introduced to cassettes by modern stars, such as Musgraves, Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo, who are releasing new music on the plastic rectangles.

You can’t blame these teens and 20-somethings for having a hard time getting the music started. Cassettes were never that easy to use. The sound wasn’t that great either—-although that didn’t bother Campbell.

“I like how nostalgic it sounds,” she said of the crackling that comes out of the speakers. 

Molly Clark, 45, said her 13-year-old daughter recently bought a cassette by Norwegian singer Aurora. There was just one problem: She had no way to play it. 

Clark’s husband dug out his ’90s-era boombox from the attic of their Minneapolis home. They later bought her a $40 Walkman on eBay that is more than 30 years old.

“It makes me smile whenever I see it because it just takes me back to when I was a kid,” said Clark, who used to record Casey Kasem’s top 40 hits show as a child by holding up a tape recorder to a radio.

Her expertise came in handy when the ribbon of her daughter’s cassette slipped out.

“She had no idea if she had ruined the thing or not,” said Clark, who showed her daughter how to wind it back using a finger. “I told her we used to use a pencil to do this.”

Cassettes started going extinct in the ’90s as people switched to CDs and then eventually streaming. Even Lou Ottens, who led a team that invented the cassette, thought people should move on. “People prefer a worse quality of sound out of nostalgia,” he said in the 2016 documentary “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape.”

But in the digital era, fans have been returning to—or, in many cases, discovering for the first time—the physical music of their favorite artists. In 2022, vinyl surpassed CD sales for the first time since 1987. Cassette sales are creeping up, too.

More than 430,000 cassettes were sold in the U.S. last year, about five times the number bought nearly a decade ago, according to data tracker Luminate. 

Two albums by the 34-year-old Swift, who wasn’t alive when the first Walkman hit stores, were among the 10 bestselling cassettes last year: the re-recordings of “1989” and “Speak Now.” Also on the list: “Punisher” by 29-year-old indie rocker Phoebe Bridgers and the soundtrack for the “Barbie” movie, whose cassettes were sold in two colors: hot pink and ocean blue. 

This year, popstars Charli XCX, Dua Lipa and Ariana Grande all released their new albums on tape.

“It’s a cash cow now,” says Jen Long, who used to run a cassette label and now manages musicians in London. “It’s another format to get you up the charts and milk money from people.” 

Long, a former BBC Radio one presenter, helped found Cassette Store Day in 2013 as a way to boost sales of tapes. But she said her passion for them has waned. 

“I feel bad for the amount of plastic we had to put out into the world,” Long said. She’s kept some of her old cassettes but mostly streams music now, and sometimes plays a record. “Tapes get played fairly rarely these days,” she said. 

Fans of cassettes say they are easier to carry around and cost less than vinyl records. Charli XCX’s “Brat” album, for example, cost $15 on tape. The vinyl version sells for $28. 

“I think they are convenient,” said 25-year-old Emily Taylor in Liverpool, England, who likes to pack Ariana Grande cassettes for long train and plane rides so she can give her phone a break and reserve its battery. “I’m glad cassettes are back.”

Andy Gutierrez, a 26-year-old in Edinburg, Texas, got into cassettes when he drove an early 2000s Mazda Tribute that still used the ancient technology. After upgrading his car, Gutierrez bought a vintage tape deck for his home and a portable Sanyo cassette player for when he was on the go.  

The Sanyo recently attracted some retirees at a beach, who stopped to say they hadn’t seen one in a while. They also questioned whether he knew how to use it.

“OK, calm down, it’s not difficult,” he remembers thinking, “you just put it in and press play.”

Write to Joseph Pisani at joseph.pisani@wsj.com