Do you have an old cassette player forgotten in the storage room? In Japan they are paying five times more for them

Vintage fashion extends to all the electronic devices that reigned in the 80s and 90s. Now it’s the turn of the cassettes.

The cassette tapes either cassette They were the main means of playing music, along with vinyl, before the advent of CDs. The cult of vintage has reached them: in the United States cassette tapes have doubled their sales this year, and in Japan the cassette players either radio cassette They double in price year after year.

Cassette tapes began to become popular in the early 1970s, and they sold well until the late 1990s. Although their great success came with the legendary portable player, the Sony Walkman launched in 1979.

The low quality of digital music in basic or free subscriptions, and the death of collecting due to the coldness of streaming platforms, has made many music lovers turn their eyes to analog music: vinyl and cassette tapes.

On streaming platforms you have tens of millions of songs at the touch of a button, and that’s… boring. Many people feel that they have lost their passion for music, by discovering albums one by one, and building your own personalized music collection.

The price of boom boxes skyrockets

For a few years, vinyl has already sold more than CDs, to the point that all the most important artists of the moment are already releasing their albums again on vinyl.

It is a phenomenon that has also reached Spain. According to StatisticalIn 2013, 140,000 vinyl records were sold in our country. In 2021, they reached 1.6 million, ten times more:

And after the vinyl, comes the cassette tape. Last year its sales doubled in the United States, reached 340,000 units. It is a low figure, but it is significant that it has doubled.

Retro films have contributed to this where the cassette tape appears frequently, such as the saga of Guardians of the Galaxyor the series Stranger Things, set in the 80s.

Modern artists like Harry Styles or billie eilish, have started selling their music albums on cassette tapes. And in Japan, cassette players have doubled in price year over year in the last three years, as our colleague Miriam Pérez tells us in Business Insider.

According to the Japanese media Asian Nikkeithe price of radio cassette that are preserved in good condition is today among the 360 and the €716.

It is true that there are modern cassette players for sale that can be bought on Amazon for just over 35 eurosbut according to Nikkei Asia, “modern models are mostly made of plastic. Fans prefer vintage players, because they are made of metal and have higher quality components.“.

“Even those that are in poor condition are sold for about 214 eurossays a representative of BuySell Technologies, a Tokyo-based company that sells a wide range of second-hand goods. Another store, Sekaimon, has sold boomboxes for about 170 euros on average this year, 50% more than in 2021, according to its owner.

If you have a radio cassette old at home, forgotten in the storage room, don’t throw it away. Maybe in a while you can get a good amount of money. At the moment in Spain they do not pay much for simple models, but radio cassette branded Sanyo, Sony either Philips with built-in speakers, already quoted on ebay above the 130 euros…