Ask Lemmy

I have an operations-based question for you. Can you recoup the cost of staff time and materials for cleaning cassettes, or possibly re-recording them (if you did that or provided that as a service)?

Also, as somebody who used to love listening to cassettes in a car that had a tape deck, I would totally be interested in buying new cassettes of modern music. Are there any self-made cassettes that you could sell without getting in legal trouble? Like music that is released under creative commons or that's in public domain?

Maybe you could have a DIY tape creation station where somebody buys a CD from you, uses your tape deck to copy it onto a blank cassette, and then sells you back the CD?

It probably wouldn't make a lawyer happy i bet!

Cassettes are a shitty medium for long-term storage. They degrade pretty fast even when stored under perfect conditions.
So only sell cassettes made up to a few months ago. If you want to trade in used stuff, do vinyl or CDs.

I understand as an alternative retailer you may be under pressure to extract value when you can, but reselling a re-recorded cassette to the general public is a legally shady, and ethically questionable. There are plenty of reasons for customers to expand their cassette collections, but sound quality is probably low on that list. I'll also bet that the risk of a potential bad customer experience is not worth the risk - especially when customers are from a niche collector market that talk amongst each other.

It's ethical to sell anything, as long as you're completely upfront and honest about any issues you're aware of, perform your due diligence in identifying any issues, and price it accordingly.

Why even consider taking the L? Sounds like you should be getting your money back. Who sold the tape to you, and how did they represent it?

Dead or damaged media can repurposed and sold as an new thing. Art and craft items using old vinyl, cassettes, floppy disks, etc. as a medium to create something new is growing in popularity too. If you can find someone making that kind of art at a show, I'm sure some kind of mutually beneficial arrangement could be made so that you both can profit off that dead media.

The record store I frequent has a section for records that are scratched to the point where they're nearly unplayable on one side, but the other side is still playable. They're usually really cheap since they're the duds that come along when the owner purchases used records in bulk.

I rarely see anyone in that section, though, and I've never bought one of those records myself. I think the owner just has it because she has the space and wants to give the unwanted records a chance even if it's unlikely anyone will ever buy them.

You could probably make such a section for damaged or re-recorded cassettes if you've got the space. Just make sure to clearly label them. Usually the damaged records at my local store have post-its on them that describe what exactly is damaged - you could probably do the same.

Have you tried any of the restoration techniques? It doesn't sound like sticky shed (baking required), but more like oxide degradation or shedding (old age) Cleaning the tape, and trying a tape player that has tone control (equaliser too, but less so) to see what you can get out of it and backing it up. That whole process excites a few people, so you could actually sell the tape as it is, but would have to let them know first. Or you could give up DIY and invest in tape restoration professionals, whom I don't think are too expensive for obvious reasons.

But there are people that will pay for degraded tapes to try and restore them, and would have higher end audio equipment to play them on etc.

Search around for guides and whatever you think may be the issue, try those first if you don't fancy replacing the tape in the cassette.

Both? Rip it digitally, rip via dubbing, sell the OG as is and offer dubs and maybe even cleaned up versions. A friend was selling Spotify playlists slapped on tapes for a bit, the worst of both worlds to me but peeps seemed to like them.

I've got Portishead - Dummy in my deck at the moment, the tape is as old as the album is, I've binned most stuff that got this distorted but Dummy with ancient tape distortion is aging like a fine wine.

To me this is a question of audio fidelity. What source would you use to re-record the tape? While it’s not unheard of to use a digital source, depending on the year this cassette was pressed it might have been a high quality analog master tape. It’s unlikely that you’re going to reproduce the exact same experience that the listener would have had from the original tape. And if you’re selling to audiophiles, they’ll know if it sounds off.

Are you sure it's a good idea when there are already a few semi-famous stores like Bandcamp or Subvert out there? Is it for your band only? And who is "we," is it serious?