Recently, I went looking for something I hadn’t shopped for in years: a cassette player. Somewhere in my house is a box filled with old cassette tapes from my years on the air. These include airchecks, interviews, and moments from radio stations — pieces of my career that somehow survived every move I’ve made. I imagine a lot of people reading this have a similar box lurking in a closet somewhere.
The funny part is that I could probably digitize most of it. I could put those recordings on a hard drive and access them with a click. But somehow that doesn’t feel like the same thing.
The Numbers Tell an Interesting Story
Apparently, I’m not alone. Vinyl continues a resurgence that has now gone on so long we probably need to stop calling it a comeback. According to the RIAA, vinyl sold 46.8 million units in the United States in 2025 compared with 29.5 million CDs. Total physical music revenue increased 5% to nearly $1.4 billion. Importantly, vinyl has now been growing for nearly two decades.
And it’s not only happening here. IFPI reports global physical music revenue grew 8% in 2025 to $5.3 billion, largely driven by vinyl. Even the cassette — the format many of us couldn’t wait to replace — refuses to disappear. Music Business Worldwide reports that in the UK, revenue from physical formats grew 11.5% in 2025. Vinyl revenue jumped 18.5%, while the category containing predominantly cassettes nearly doubled, increasing 95%.
Nobody is suggesting Spotify needs to start worrying about the cassette deck. Something else is happening.
What People Are Really Craving
John Lenac, Chief Strategy Officer at Citizen Vinyl, gave me what I think may be the best explanation. “I think what people are really responding to isn’t the format itself, it’s the attention it demands. Vinyl doesn’t let you skip around or half-listen in the background — it asks you to sit with something for forty minutes.”
Think about how completely opposite that is from almost everything we’ve built over the past 20 years. Music became frictionless. Want a song? It’s there. Don’t like it? Skip it. Don’t know what you want? An algorithm will decide. Want something different? There are another hundred million songs waiting. We successfully removed almost every obstacle between the consumer and the music. And perhaps we removed something else along the way.
“In a culture built around infinite, frictionless content, that kind of deliberate attention has become rare enough to feel almost radical,” Lenac told me. “People aren’t just buying records, they’re buying back a piece of their own focus.” That sentence stuck with me.
Maybe the vinyl resurgence isn’t really about vinyl. Maybe the cassette resurgence isn’t about cassettes. And I highly doubt anyone suddenly decided reel-to-reel tape was the most practical way to listen to music. Instead, this is about ritual.
The Ritual We Lost and Need to Recover
“We didn’t lose interest in music, we lost the ritual around it,” Lenac said. “Vinyl brings the ritual back — the act of choosing a record, holding the sleeve, committing to a full side.” There was once a process attached to music.
You went to a record store. And you flipped through albums. Then you stared at the artwork. Maybe talked to somebody behind the counter who might tell you what record you needed to hear. Then took it home. You opened it. You put it on. Even a cassette required a commitment that streaming doesn’t. You owned something.
That doesn’t make streaming bad. Streaming has given music fans access previous generations couldn’t have imagined. Globally, recorded music revenue reached $31.7 billion in 2025, with paid streaming continuing to drive the business. However, perhaps convenience and connection aren’t always the same thing.
Where Radio Fits In
And that’s where I think radio should pay attention. Radio has spent years trying to eliminate friction too. We’ve tightened the breaks. And reduced interruptions. Made everything more seamless. We’ve automated more of the experience. We’ve given people fewer reasons to tune away. All of those things can make sense. But are we occasionally engineering the ritual out of radio?
Some of the things people remember most about great radio weren’t necessarily efficient. Waiting for a countdown to hear where your favorite song landed wasn’t efficient. Calling a DJ to request a song wasn’t efficient. Sitting through a personality telling a great story before finally playing the record wasn’t efficient. It was an experience. That’s an important distinction.
Lenac put it simply: “That deliberateness is what people are actually craving right now.” Maybe that’s the lesson buried inside all these records, cassettes, and dusty old tapes we’re suddenly digging out again. Technology has become extraordinarily good at giving us everything we want instantly. But sometimes what we really want is a reason to stop, listen, and care. Ultimately, maybe we’re not trying to go backward at all. Maybe we’re trying to recover something we accidentally engineered out of the experience.
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David Hill serves as a Music Radio Editor, Columnist and Features writer for Barrett Media. A radio lifer with more than 30 years behind the mic, in the control room, and in the program director’s chair, David’s career spans influential stops at brands such as WIYY 98 Rock, WBAL-AM, and 99X. He has worked across multiple formats and ownership groups, including iHeartMedia and Cumulus Media, developing talent, breaking music, and navigating every major industry shift from diary to PPM and terrestrial dominance to streaming disruption. When he’s not writing or analyzing the industry, Dave runs The Tune Farm, a marketing firm built to help artists and brands grow audience the same way great radio always has—by creating connection, not just impressions. He can be reached at David@BarrettMedia.com.