July 22, 2008

Resurrection of the Cassette Tape?

Posted by Suemedha Sood at 1:57PM

• Comment Now
• Email
• Print
• Reprints
• Share

I blogged a couple months ago about the death of the record store. So I was really intrigued when I read a post on Boing Boing Gadgets about cassettes still being a multi-million dollar industry. In prison.

The Boing Boing post references a NYTimes article about a North Hollywood-based mail-order tape business. Pack Central is a retailer that caters to about 50,000 prisoners. The inventory includes 10,000 CD titles and 5,000 cassette titles.

But as Boing Boing's John Brownlee points out, unlike a CD, "[A] tape can't be broken apart and used as a shiv. Prisoners are allowed to have them."

According to the Times article, current top-selling cassette titles include Mariah Carey's "E=MC2" and Lil Wayne's "Tha Carter III." Evergreen best sellers include Al Green's "Greatest Hits" and Michael Jackson's "Thriller." They might not sound the best on analog, but it's better than prison with no music.

The biggest takeaway point from this story, I think, is that corporate record companies could learn something from Park Central. This small retailer is doing so well because it's opening itself up to an undervalued market. If the recording industry put more resources toward innovative technology and business strategies it wouldn't have to go after so many illegal downloaders.