For $5 at the New York City Tape Fair, you can leave with Geto Boys’ single “The World is a Ghetto” on cassette. For $3, you could choose between Public Enemy’s “Give it Up,” or an essay collection called Naked Beneath My Clothes: Tales of a Revealing Nature. For just $2 at the fair, you can leave with a speed reading warm-up exercise, which I imagine involves some kind of supersonic dictation. At the fair’s second year at Selva, a bar and record store in Bushwick, the scene is pouring into the street. Cassette tapes, as sales signs are showing, “are back.”

When you’re holding an ‘80s-era Grateful Dead cassette and eyeing a VHS tape for the 1993 film “Carnosaur,” it’s easy to chalk the hype up to nostalgia. But the cassette tape revival is more protest than poetry. In the thorny legal realm of music sharing, cassettes emerge as both predecessor and successor to burned CDs, Napster, Limewire and torrenting. And in 2026, as we sink deeper into the data collection age, surrounded by music streaming Goliaths, and fatigued by the optimization pursuits of vinyl’s second golden age, cassettes offer a different kind of fidelity — that which belongs to the individual. 

So when you already own wired headphones, all you’re missing is a deck. 

And maybe, I guess, some cassette tapes. The 2026 fair topped last year’s attendance, more than a thousand people, with a vendor list longer than the space could hold. Organizer Anthony Morton said he was looking for a place that catered to tape collectors, not vinyl collectors, and he couldn’t find one. So he started the fair. 

Pricier tapes on Discogs might go into the hundreds while rare vinyl blows past that by orders of magnitude. But scarcity is orthogonal, at best, to the point of tape collecting: The most revolutionary trait of the cassette is that it can be reproduced. 

Cassette tapes were originally intended for dictation. That’s how I’m using mine when I interview Danny Hamilton. I met Hamilton at the fair this year where he was manning a booth selling cassettes on behalf of the record store he works at. He recognized me from online Deadhead circles and is a small collector himself — a record store employee who doesn’t prefer records.  

Hamilton got his first deck when he was 15, after growing up around CDs and MP3 players. He’s in his early 30s now and part of the modern collector movement of young people drawn to cassettes over vinyl, CDs, and streaming. On a park bench in Brooklyn, a month after the fair, my $40 Jensen tape deck recorded our conversation. 

Hamilton gave me a few blank tapes to use for my interviews, all of which were translucent hot pink. At first they didn’t work, thanks to write-protect tabs on the tape, two holes that, when open, prevent recording over a tape. You can fool the recorder by covering the holes, apparently, and if I had ever recorded a tape in my life I’d have known this, but Hamilton is nice about it. He grabbed office tape from his apartment to stick over the tabs. “Tape it!” the office tape label says. 

A tape records sound by converting an electrical signal into a magnetic pattern that gets stamped onto a spinning reel of tape coated in magnetic particles, then reads that same pattern back as sound when you play it. The small, skinny tape used in compact cassettes means there’s a ceiling on sound quality. When I played the Hamilton cassette back later, on the $40 Jensen, it sounded like we were underwater. 

Compound the tape quality with multi-generation recordings (meaning a tape that’s been copied and copied again) and the skills of an empowered amateur like me, and you have a vision of the common cassette.

The impulse to copy a show and pass it along is older than the current revival. 

Taping culture has a direct line back to the psychedelic scene through Owsley "Bear" Stanley, the LSD chemist who became the Grateful Dead's soundman. Stanley bankrolled their early hi-fi obsession after the band first caught his ear at the Acid Tests, the Ken Kesey-organized happenings. Before long, he was running tape from the mixing board at their shows. The tapers' section that formalized amateur recording grew out of a culture Stanley helped originate: The idea that a show was worth documenting in the first place.

And when you document on tape, you get what you pay for. 

“In the bands that I was playing in, there was a certain level of sound degradation that was part of the aesthetic,” musician Bea Levy tells me. Her teenage DIY bands used to record and sell tapes in the Denver area and on small tours, back in the early 2000s. “If you’re recording onto one mic in a room with a bunch of amplifiers, it’s not going to sound good,” she says. “And that was kind of part of the thing that we were going for.” 

An audiophile striving toward imperfection may sound improbable. After all, the modern vinyl revival treats loss, interference, and degradation as things to be minimized. In vinyl listening bars, you’re quieted with a finger over the mouth and a “Shhh.” Serious live music fans, like Deadheads, are no strangers to this, either — the holy soundboard, the quest for the single best iteration of a song. But for cassette heads, the pursuit of each instance of music is more worthwhile than a single studio recording to rule them all. 

“There could be hiss on it, there could be multiple generations, it could be distorted, but if the music was good, you didn’t hear any of that,” says Jesse Jarnow, a music collector, WFMU DJ and writer who hosts the podcast The Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast. “If you stopped to think about it, you’d be like, ‘This tape sounds like shit.’” 

But what did it matter, he says, as long as he had the tape?   

I met Jarnow last year at a reading for a book about the Dead’s famous sonic achievement, the Wall of Sound (a gigantic wall of speakers spearheaded by Owsley, basically). He’s just old enough to have seen the Dead live. At his first show, he brought his small boombox and placed it by his feet to take the music home with him. The resulting tape is “basically all crowd noise,” he says, but it’s special anyway, because he had gone with his dad. He brought it to our coffee meeting, still intact more than 30 years later.

Deadheads have been creating audience recordings of live shows since the early days of the group in the 1960s, and many were on display for sale at the fair. When cassette tapes emerged, audience taping no longer meant hauling large reel-to-reel setups in backpacks. And suddenly copying and sharing was even easier. The practice spread to other jam bands and still exists today, both in archiving and as an active practice. 

Brendan McGill lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with his girlfriend, newborn, and around a thousand cassette tapes. We met through the internet music world, where he’s in the scene as a modern taper. That means going to shows, maybe one a month, with his own audio recording equipment and capturing the soundwaves. Sometimes he’s in the official taper’s section, and other times he’s sneaking his equipment in. 

For McGill, taping is somewhere between archiving and art-making. I ask what makes a good show tape for him, if he’s chasing soundboard quality and perfection. He corrects me.

The soundboard isn’t perfect, he says. It’s mixed to the space and the room. When you lose that context, you don’t just cause imbalance. You tell a hollow story. “Soundboards lack a sense of fullness and a sense of warmth that you get when you’re in the room,” he says.

When McGill listens to older tapes in his collection, from other tapers, it’s like he’s there. He can hear if it’s a big show, a small show, an indoor venue, an outdoor venue. The sound of a beer can being opened or someone shouting a request for a specific song make him feel like he’s there.

McGill tells me he hasn’t actually listened to most of his tapes. But listening to cassettes might be second or third in importance to things like holding them, looking at them, and organizing them.

“I love to stack them up,” Jarnow, the music writer, says. Admittedly I have enjoyed stacking my now 20-cassette collection into its mounted plastic rack in my office. Ancient fidget spinners you can admire and open up. The artful paper insert, the J-card, it’s called, is rich with data. These contain more information than a digital database can properly taxonomize, Jarnow tells me. They also contain more lies. He holds up a Dead-era tape labeled “Ithaca College.”  

“This was not at Ithaca College,” he says. Somewhere in the daisy chained game of musical telephone, the information got warped. 

Jarnow is a true historian and collector, so these details matter for his collection. A collection is like a visual corpus, he tells me. A display of how someone’s brain works. The bigger it is, the more you see inside their mind. How they map time and concepts, how they make sense of the world. Spines of handwritten J-cards create a person’s own musical library that exists nowhere but on that shelf, like mine in my office.

The J-card is its own piece of art, cut and folded by hand, often designed by the person who made or replicated the tape. Hamilton, the amateur collector from the Tape Fair, tells me vinyl bootlegs come with art, too, but it’s usually a copy of the original album art, a grainy reproduction rather than something original. Levy, the musician who recorded her band’s music on cassettes, tells me they’d sometimes accordion entire zines into her band’s tapes.

Cassette tapes “allow for individual control of the means of production,” wrote professor Steve Jones in his article “Cassette Underground,” in 1990. The J-card, more than a grainy bootleg scan of an album cover, is a reflection of the independent hands that put the music into yours. 

And trading spreads the musical bounty. When McGill, the taper, trades his tapes, he says it’s like he “got something beautiful for free, out of a conversation or an experience.” A musical gestalt. 

McGill reminded me of my cousin, who used to torrent movies and store them on a personal hard drive. If he got his hands on a new movie, his rule was he had to also share it 10 times. Get art, spread art. Eventually, he received a cease-and-desist letter. With cassette tapes, on the other hand, there’s no digital liability trail involved. 

Richard Rothenberg is surrounded by that liability in his home on Long Island, where he lives with a collection of 180,000 recorded shows of various artists. He’s introduced to me as an “archivist,” and I realize the level of dignity in the title depends on whether your wife is supportive. Rothenberg’s recordings (each with multiple backups) take up more than two entire rooms in their house on Long Island. “My wife is a saint,” he says. 

The lifelong recording engineer has spent his career recording live shows, mostly digitally, for artists and bands themselves. He was in the New Orleans funk and blues scene and recorded for the Dead’s drummer, Bill Kreutzmann. For him, a perfect live show recording really does exist. But to get it, you have to get the rights holders — the artist, the songwriter, the label, the venue — involved. Everything else is at best amateur and at worst a legal minefield. 

“These people,” — tapers, bootleggers, people who release shows anonymously on Archive.org — “believe the rights holders have no bearing on it,” he says. “They don’t care.”

It’s not that Rothenberg is against free music. He just sees it as something that never existed. For those owners, each of the thousands of unreleased shows could be a potential vector for cash. A copied tape is, technically, skirting someone. Everything belongs to somebody.

But what belongs to the listener? 

Once the soundwaves hit the air, do they belong to the audience? Apparently not. Rothenberg reminds me of this — that the only thing that belongs to us in this world is what we get to experience in each moment. Everything else is a war against time, physics, and perhaps the rights holders of the music.

But a tape is yours to play forever. When I press “Stop” on my $40 Jensen, it stops right where I told it, memory stored in its physicality, not on a server. The number of plays is tracked only by the wear on the magnetic strip, the soundwaves existing as an object on my shelf, something I can even look at and touch. Just me and the music, no middlemen.

I asked Levy if she would have cared if someone took one of her band’s $10 tapes and duplicated the music. She shook her head no, but then waffled. “Well, I say that now, but maybe at the time I would have been like, what the fuck, that’s $6 [in profit] that we should have had.”

The path to supporting artists feels increasingly opaque. It’s not that any bootleg customer, duplicator or Dead taper is under the illusion that that money is going back to the artist, either. But it at least feels like supporting the musical community surrounding them.

“Streaming [music] to me feels like I’m going to the mall,” Jarnow tells me. “There’s this music that I want to listen to that’s made by people that are interesting and cool, but then there’s all this corporate stuff.” 

Unlike independent tapers like McGill, or more liberated collectors like Aadam Jacobs, who recently uploaded his 10,000-show tape collection to Archive.org, Rothenberg doesn’t feel comfortable sharing music he helped record when he knows the rights holders personally. Too risky, he says. Sometimes, he says, he digs up a show from his archive and plays it at home, in his office, just for himself. The recordings can't go further than those walls, or a lawsuit might come his way. Digital files make that risk easier to trace back to him than a cassette ever could.

To me, this is the beauty of the cassette: Whether the music has a market doesn’t bear on whether it could find a backroad to a listener, trade in a cashless exchange, or accompany someone — just one person — who couldn’t make it to Ithaca College (or wherever it might have been) that day. An abundant musical harvest is possible, rather than what Rothenberg describes as the fate of his collection: “Fallow.”

Ultimately, Rothenberg doesn’t know what to do with his 180,000 shows, at once potentially valuable and valueless. Same for Jarnow, who admits he has masters in his collection that don’t matter to him personally anymore. 

“Has someone ever digitized these tapes to put them in an archive?” Jarnow asks himself. “I’m not going to throw these out, they’re the masters. But, you know, am I the only person responsible for this in the world? Would this disappear if I throw it away? And does that matter?” 

Maybe he can sell them for a buck or two at next year’s Tape Fair.

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