Audio cassettes were great for albums. For the most part, you had to listen to them the way the artist intended. It was like reading a book, not for quotes, but for meaning. The spell is only cast when you read the sentences in order until the end. Sure you'd like a track more than the others, but the whole thing was an experience packaged by the artist. Cassettes didn't give the instant gratification of an audio streaming service, but they gave us the ability to carry the sounds that stayed with us. In a Walkman. In the cassette player in our cars. Cassettes were meant to be kept, and because they were relatively cheap and sturdy, they democratized access to recorded sound across the world.

Are we trading in nostalgia? Perhaps a little. Pushing a cassette into the slot of a cassette player, hitting rewind and play, is like driving a 1980s Corolla. You feel things and hear sounds and face resistance through it all that we have paid dearly to get rid of. The more frictionless our consumption becomes, the more meaningless it is. This is of course a world view and not without its pitfalls. Nostalgia can be a dangerous thing too. 

But our world is undeniably noisier than it ever was. We've reached a point where algorithms guide us through the noise, monetize our attention and leave us intellectually poorer. Thing is, not everything we hear stays with us. Most of it passes through, played once, maybe twice, then replaced by whatever comes next. Rarely, something holds. An album, a voice, a moment in a podcast. Sounds that don't just sound good, but disturb the way we see ourselves and the world around us. We call them keepers, and they're the heart of what this platform is. That's the extent of our politics: we're here to fight the algorithm, one keeper at a time. 

We've developed this platform to resist popularity or trends and engagement metrics. It isn't about how many times something gets played or how often you return to it, which we know is all the algorithm cares about. Cassette is different because it is about the sounds that became part of you in a personal way, and you carry them like you carry yourself. "Take the L Train (To 8 Ave.)" by Brooklyn Funk Essentials transports you to Union Square while you're still sitting in Paris. How does that happen? Sound sets the mood: Claustrophobia. Liminal space. Arriving. Recorded sound can be a cue to the mind even more than moving image. We're after that feeling and that's why keepers have liner notes. Sometimes it's a memory, or a joke. Perhaps just a cryptic sentence. It doesn't have to be polished or complete. It just has to be yours. And you can share it, if you want. Or keep it to yourself. It works both ways. In creating this platform, our aim is to build a unified home for personal archives of music, podcasts, and audiobooks. Cassette is as much a platform for you to rate and write liner notes about podcasts as it is for music and audiobooks.