DesignBoom just put together a nice little piece on the comeback of cassette tape culture. With all the 80s retro-love going on right now it's no surprise that one of the major icons of the culture is seeing a renaissance. What's oddly ironic is pretty much all the recycled aspects of the cassette have absolutely nothing to do with using them to listen to music. For the most part, hipsters use them as a symbol of their youth and/or a sort of vintage affiliation, but the MP3 remains the chief format of the current musical landscape.

That's kind of sad, because in my opinion the defining use of the cassette was the mixtape. Not the sappy radio-recorded stuff guys put together to impress girls, but the true mixtape. Whether it be the underground hip hop tapes in NYC, rave-scene mixes through the 90s, or indie bands putting them together with a cheap home recording setup, the cassette was the first time home recording became so cheap and accessible. Through dubbing, it was also the first easy-to-copy format that allowed original runs of a couple hundred tapes to multiply into thousands and friends dubbed them and passed them along.

Check the full article at DesignBoom