VIDEO - A Global Shortage of Magnetic Tape Leaves Cassette Fans Reeling - WSJ

SPRINGFIELD, Mo.— Steve Stepp and his team of septuagenarian engineers are using a bag of rust, a kitchen mixer larger than a man and a 62-foot-long contraption that used to make magnetic strips for credit cards to avert a disaster that no one saw coming in the digital-music era.

The world is running out of cassette tape.

National Audio Co., where Mr. Stepp is president and co-owner, has been hoarding a stockpile of music-quality, ⅛-inch-wide magnetic tape from suppliers that shut down in the past 15 years after music lovers ditched cassettes. National Audio held on. Now, many musicians are clamoring for cassettes as a way to physically distribute their music.

The company says it has less than a year’s supply of tape left. So it is building the first manufacturing line for high-grade ferric oxide cassette tape in the U.S. in decades. If all goes well, the machine will churn out nearly 4 miles of tape a minute by January. And not just any tape. “The best tape ever made,” boasts Mr. Stepp, 69 years old. “People will hear a whole new product.”

“Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda insisted that “The Hamilton Mixtape,” a 23-track album based on the hit Broadway musical and released last year, be available in cassette format. Brooklyn post-punk trio Big Bliss’s cassette debut last year earned music-blog reviews and gas money on the band’s first tour, even though the musicians didn’t have a cassette player when the tape was released.

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Metallica is a repeat customer of National Audio, and the company’s 45 employees have produced cassette soundtracks for installments of the movies “Star Wars” and “Guardians of the Galaxy” and a surprise release by the platinum pop act Twenty One Pilots. It left the factory in unmarked boxes.

Most customers are up-and-coming bands, hobbyists or eccentrics who order 50 to 500 copies at a time, including a man who claimed to have recorded the sound of grass growing, according to Mr. Stepp.

Mr. Stepp’s father sold reels of background music to restaurants and factories. The family started National Audio in 1969, buying an early type of tape and loading it into cartridges for radio stations. The company began selling cassettes a few years later.

When tapes took over the music business, outselling vinyl records by the early 1980s, National Audio stuck to the spoken word. The company produced continuing-education lessons for lawyers, magazines read aloud for the blind and blank cassettes.

For years, Joyce Meyer Ministries, an evangelical Christian group based in Fenton, Mo., ordered 250,000 blank tapes a week on which it dubbed sermons and self-help advice. Listeners of “How to Hear From God” and “Eat & Stay Thin” kept Mr. Stepp prowling for supplies long after most music fans switched to compact discs. When competitors scrapped their cassette equipment, National Audio would send a truck and offer pennies on the dollar.

“They were laughing as we drove away because they were putting in CD-replicating lines,” he says.

The joke was on them. Cassettes are cool again, particularly with listeners raised on earbuds, MP3s and streaming music. Sales are small but rising, according to Nielsen Music data.

The founders of Burger Records, an independent label run from a Southern California strip mall, grew fond of the cassette format a decade ago when their band, Thee Makeout Party, was touring in a van equipped with a cassette deck. The band had copied records to cassettes so they would have tunes to play on the road. They decided to sell their own music on cassette.

Burger has sold some 500,000 copies of about 1,000 different releases on cassette, ranging from new bands to reissued albums by Green Day and Weezer. Other labels chuckled at first. “When they realized they could make a buck or two on these things, they started doing it themselves,” says Burger co-founder Sean Bohrman.

Nostalgia and analog chic aside, cassettes solve two dilemmas: the high cost of making vinyl records and getting fans to buy digital downloads, particularly when bands are touring. A hundred cassettes packaged with download coupons can be made in a few weeks for a few hundred dollars, compared with months and thousands of dollars for vinyl. They often sell at retail for as little as $5 each.

“Plus, tapes fit in your breast pocket, which is pretty great,” says Mr. Miranda, the “Hamilton” composer.

National Audio got small orders from Burger and other record labels. Then Pearl Jam called. The Seattle rock band needed 15,000 copies for a 2011 box set. Smashing Pumpkins followed. Metallica wanted 20,000 replicas of its original demo tape.

Mr. Stepp’s company has had to rely on repurposed equipment, including an 80-year-old machine built to seal cigarette packs with cellophane. It was modified to wrap cassettes. National Audio has a Noah’s ark of spare parts to keep what Mr. Stepp calls its “orphaned” gear running.

“It’s the finest equipment the 1960s has to offer,” he says amid rows of whirring duplicators.

When his supplier in South Korea stopped making tape in 2014, Mr. Stepp bought everything that was left. He found tape in China but deemed it “consistently mediocre.” It was suitable for spoken word but not rock ’n’ roll. National Audio’s stockpile shrank.

Tape-making is complicated. The process includes a finely calibrated slurry of metallic particles and polyurethane, miles of Mylar, 48 feet of ovens, a small amount of radioactivity and a very precise slicer. Employees broke an elevator while hauling in a 4,600-pound component that squeezes tape to a shine.

Mr. Stepp, who owns National Audio with his wife and adult children, hopes to ship the first cassettes made with the new tape by January. After that, he plans to start selling bulk tape to other cassette makers.

He is working the phones to promote the new product and take orders. Mr. Stepp says he treats every customer alike, whether they order 50 cassettes or 15,000, recalling that the company’s first order from Joyce Meyer Ministries brought in just $35.

“You never know who you’re dealing with or who that person will become,” he says.

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/cassettes-are-making-a-comeback-but-there-s-a-kink-nobody-makes-tape-1509723435