At Moore Market, it was raining in a rhythmic wave. Drops fell, paused, and gathered again, travelling across the market in little bursts before finding its way to the shop where I stood. A wave rarely reaches the sea shore in one straight leap. It takes several rises and falls before it gets there. Likewise, inside the shop, a sea unfolded with audio cassettes.
I had stopped by to look at the cassette collection when a conversation with the shopkeeper opened up a small window into a medium that was once everywhere and is now finding its way back, slowly but not steadily.
For sellers and collectors in Chennai, audio cassettes are no longer just remnants of another time. There are people looking for them, asking for specific albums from certain musicians, hunting for rare editions and, in some cases, buying them without even owning a player to listen to them. “Cassettes are black diamonds,” says Sudhir Viyas D, film marketing head at BeatRoute and a collector who has been amassing them since 2016.
His relationship with the format goes back to the early 2000s. He remembers being in Class 3 when a tape recorder first arrived at his home. The excitement of having one, he says, remains one of his strongest childhood memories.
Over the years, he watched the way people listened to music change — from cassettes to CDs and eventually to digital platforms. “I saw the evolution in how we listen to music, and in that process I felt a disconnect with music itself,” he says.
That feeling brought him back to cassettes. He began assembling them, often saving them from friends who tried to discard them. On one occasion, he airlifted around 250 to 300 cassettes from Mumbai, spending about ₹8,000 on the lot.
An evolving trade
“Many cassettes are damaged today, but I am happy that, at least for aesthetic purposes, this trend has come back,” he says.
The trend has given antique store vendors and old paper shops an opportunity to make a fortune. At one such shop, K Sakthivel Antique Store, the owner, K Sakthivel, briefs on his family business, which deals in vinyls, antique furniture, cassettes, and tape recorders. The family would often have 40 to 50 such items at a time. Today, people continue to walk in looking for them. “They are interested, so they come and buy them,” he says as a matter of fact.
The numbers, too, suggest that the interest is more than an occasional search. Sakthivel estimates that sales can vary considerably, with some months seeing 500 to 1,000 pieces sold. Across a year, he estimates the figure could be around 5,000 to 10,000 pieces.
The demand is also particular. Customers come looking for fixed English, Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu music. Some want certain artistes or albums, while others are interested in rare or antique pieces. If a requested cassette is not available, sellers sometimes try to source it from elsewhere.
Most of the sourcing, Sakthivel says, happens within Chennai, though sellers and buyers may also look towards places such as Andhra Pradesh or other parts of south India. A cassette sourced through another trader may cost a little more, but that is part of the chain that keeps the format moving.
And then there are the people who arrive with cassettes of their own. Some want to sell old collections accumulated at home. Others simply want to give them away. Sakthivel recalls people telling him they would arrive by car and did not want any money for the cassettes. They simply wanted someone to take them.
But not everything that looks old is valuable. The condition of a tape, its sourceability, and its original release can all determine its worth. Some collectors are willing to buy a cassette even if they have no intention of playing it. Some use it as props for their shoots.
Sakthivel predicts that more people could follow this trend, also because of the recently released Tamil movie, Once More. For that movie, a scene was shot at his store showing his extensive collection.
Rarity sells
To address the growing demand, Susai Raj A, another antique vendor at Moore Market, began the cassette trade only about two months ago. This decision was come upon looking at the growing interest, particularly in cassettes featuring Ilaiyaraaja. Susai says, “With audio cassettes and records, there is a certain amount of knowledge involved. Some customers know exactly what they are looking for even though I don’t know as much as them.”
Limited editions are especially sought after. Some labels, Pyramid, for instance, produced only a few hundred or a thousand copies of an album, making those tapes harder to find today. Releases of legendary composers, as well as devotional music, have their own pool of buyers. “When it comes to compositions of Ilaiyaraaja or AR Rahman, I don’t understand the craze in demand. Since I don’t know the worth, it can be confusing to fix a price. So, I have to research it and find out,” he admits. He cites Mani Ratnam’s Mouna Raagam, released in 1986 with music by Ilaiyaraaja, as one example of the kind of release collectors may seek out.
Nostalgia in all forms
There is one practical problem that sits at the centre of the revival — what happens after you buy the cassette? The machines that once sat in homes are now harder to find. Some people might still have cassette players while others have the tapes, but nothing to play them on. For collectors, that does not always matter. The object has become part of the attraction that movies are considering this culture.
In recent years, the format has appeared in limited-edition releases, including Think Music’s release of audio cassettes for the Malayalam film Hridayam, composed by Hesham Abdul Wahab. It is a new leap for a format once considered obsolete.
For sellers, it is a market built around scarcity. Sakthivel sees it as a personal memory. His father dealt in these objects, and that history gives the cassettes in his shop a sentimental value beyond their price.
For collectors, it is a physical archive. Sudhir travels in time with his long collection. He grew up with them; this resurgence of cassettes is a trend where he can hold, search for, collect, and preserve them.
But whether this is the beginning of a lasting revival or simply another brief return of an old format remains uncertain. Susai sees the comeback as part of a much larger cycle. The technology changes, the medium changes, and eventually something old can become new again. “It is like waves: with each new one, a new trend is in place, and then it disappears when the next one appears,” he says, explaining this cassette trend as a wave that would eventually crash on the shore, paving the way for the next wave to rise and fall — film cameras.