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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

I work in an art university and a surprising amount of new (underground/experimental) musicians release their music on casettes.

If you wanna sell music on concerts vinyl is too expensive/you would have to upfront too much money, CDs are dead, casettes however had some sort of revival. Vinyl is still king in those circles, but it requres you to be able to realistically finance and sell a run of 250 pieces to be economical.

I saw people buy casettes (with a download code) while not having a player — it is a neat physical artifact for some.

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CDRs just make more sense here in every way. Higher quality, cheaper to produce and les degradation. Fucking hipsters.

Most of the artists I'm familiar with that release on cassette tapes are vaporwave or adjacent and sell their work as DRM-free lossless FLAC files on Bandcamp as well, so there's really no downside for the artist or the audience.

i love vaporwave on cassettes, because the medium lends itself to the art

you never know if that flutter / wow effect was originally in the song or coming from the deck

Art has to be deliberate surely? What you’re describing is just noise I would say.

But we’re getting philosophocal.

Art has to be deliberate?! Don't tell Duchamp!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_object

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readymades_of_Marcel_Duchamp

> Types of readymades

> Readymades - un-altered objects

> Assisted readymades - putting several readymades together taking away their use

> Rectified readymades - an altered or marked readymade

> Corrected readymades

> Reciprocal readymades - a unique art work presented as a mass-produced utilitarian object

Choosing a medium that carries particular characteristic can be a deliberate choice.

Like film grain or contrast. Still love the look of pushed kodak tri-x.

With an art definition from before the first world war, maybe.

Only if you assume people are after the music and not a cool artifact, memento or souvenir.

How is a CD-R not also an artifact, memento, or souvenir?

It misses the "cool" bit

To follow-on:

Niche physical releases are cool because they're intentionally obscure and for fans, by fans, and explicitly for certain subcultures or even collectors within those subcultures. I've seen floppy disk and Nintendo DS cartridge releases.

There are even more formats out there you can (re)release on:

https://www.dookiedemastered.com/

Previously on HN (788 points 16 days ago 205 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41790295

>Niche physical releases are cool

Um, CDs are also "niche physical releases" these days. They're not quite as old-fashioned as cassettes or vinyl, but they're still generally considered "obsolete" now with streaming music services.

Not nearly niche enough for some hypebeasts, but nothing wrong with CDs in and of themselves. I think finding ways to recontextualize the experience of owning and listening are worthwhile.

I am a musician myself and I have frienda who live from touring — they told me there have been tours where they haven't sold a single CD while they sell 15 to 20 LPs on a small concert.

Killing the most ubiquitous format for free lossless digital audio and replacing it with analogue sources that degrade with each play or DRM and subscriptions purely because it’s not cool enough seems like a terrible idea. Apparently that’s where we are.

You missed the part where I mentioned download codes, right?

Cassettes are more expensive and worse quality, but significantly more robust in typical use until you put it in a bad device (or hands) that gets the tape out.

I've given cassettes to a 3 year old, and they all still play fine except for that one where the tape got out (cheap player). I don't think CDRs (or commercial CDs for that matter) would sound as nice after the rough treatment they got.

CDR degradation can be total and I don't know of any tools to recover them.

I have a box full of unreadable CDRs from 20 years ago and a box full of perfectly playable cassettes from 40 years ago.

The cassettes sounded awful on day one, and rest assured they didn't get better with age. (Neither did the capstan in your cassette deck, which I'd suggest checking to make sure it isn't turning into goop that will literally ruin your tapes for good.)

Meanwhile, my CD-Rs are still fine, but then I didn't buy the cheapest ones I could find.

Out of all the 80s artifacts that hipsters could resurrect... wow, just wow. Cassettes. They could have brought back designer jeans, off-the-shoulder blouses, normally-aspirated V12 Ferraris, and cheap cocaine... but no, they decided to rehabilitate cassette tapes. This truly is the worst timeline.

You are aware that there are people who like the sound of tape noise and the saturation comes with it?

As a medium it also one of the few that gives listeners a high incentive to not skip songs.

These are valid artistic choices, just like you know guitarist who run their guitar through amplifiers that distort. On persons "mistake" can be another persons goal.

Also: if the thing includes a download code to a lossless flac, why would someone even consider to buy a CD? So they can listen to the exactly same thing, but with worse ergonomics? With the casette you get at least a different variant of the thing.

I wouldn't use it myself if I made classical or choir music, but that is not what I do.

> These are valid artistic choices, just like you know guitarist who run their guitar through amplifiers that distort. On persons "mistake" can be another persons goal.

Sure, if that’s what you want to do, do it and the record it on a better medium.

You are aware that there are people who like the sound of tape noise and the saturation comes with it?

Great. They can get that with a DSP plugin. "They" being the artist, if that's what they want their music to sound like.

It's more than just a neat physical artifact - cassettes add a pleasing saturation and natural compression (of the musical kind, not the file kind) to the sound, which most would describe as a bit more 'warmth' and 'energy'. This is why people sometimes say that music just sounds better on cassette or vinyl. In some ways, it literally does! Perfect reproduction of sound is not the only dimension of musical quality or enjoyment.

I can understand the attraction of a set of needlessly complicated physical contraptions that outweighs the appeal of the actual outcome - and not talking about making coffee here - so cassettes make a lot of sense, they’re unusual, uncommon, and look better on a shelf :)

Frustrating that MiniDisc was always a niche thing - those were cool looking physical artifacts and even practical.

Of course real hipsters do FLAC on Iomega ZIP drives.

You can still find some artists on Bandcamp that release on mini disc. Whenever I see them, I buy one to try and help encourage more artists to do this.

And of course, many artists release on cassette. I have an album from Dirty Art Club on it's way to add to my cassette collection as we speak. My collection has grown considerably in the two-ish years I've been using Bandcamp, despite the sad controversy.

I still have my minidisc player. It can even record. It's an awesome little machine.

NetMD or Hi-MD deviceces even let you “record” over USB (Hi-MD even can expose a block device).

Not that long ago I would use scripts to dump CDs to MD using linux-minidisc. Much more convenient to Cary around than CDs, geat audio quality.

The only downside, imho, is when I’m on vacation I like looking at second hand places and if I find a some CDs I can’t play them until I get home. I really miss the CD deck in cars.

I was wondering if NFC tech could bring back physical media. I think NFC can transmit unlimited data and you could embed it in a collectible card.

NFC isn't unlimited, and the bitrate is very low. For a storage medium, it's not really very suitable for files. It would probably make more sense to embed a URL, with the actual data hosted online.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-field_communication

> NFC tags are passive data stores which can be read, and under some circumstances written to, by an NFC device. They typically contain data (as of 2015 between 96 and 8,192 bytes) and are read-only in normal use, but may be rewritable.

> 424 kbit/s

> make more sense to embed a URL

...which will promptly disappear once the company decides to end their incredible journey.

You're right, of course. It should obviously be a magnet link or NZB file. :P

Some kpop groups have released "NFC cd" albums that use nfc and an app to "play the album". They are essentially keychains.

But in the kpop world buying albums is less about listening to the CD and more for the merch/supporting specific artists.

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