Long Play is a publication devoted to sound as lived experience. There are eight billion ways to relate to music, to remember through it, to revel in it, to be saved by it. Podcasts and audiobooks now belong to this same reckoning, shaping how we understand our societies and our collective memory.

Long Play is an integral part of cassette.to. LPs, after all, are the cultural forebears of audio cassettes, and in many ways the antecedents of their modern revival. We founded both together because cassette is for reading and writing, and no sound archive is complete without a place for deeper exploration of how we relate to music and other forms of recorded sound.

In building cassette, we are acutely aware of the absence that made Long Play necessary. Writing about sound has long been synonymous with pop culture, literary elitism, the Western ear and aesthetic, and the authority of the Critic. Corporate publishing has steadily narrowed the space for independent voices and the algorithm has homogenized listening histories and taste. But we're at a turning point. We are creating a space for joy and meaning in place of the absence created by mainstream publishing and social media.

Long Play is listener-driven, just like the cassette liner notes. We are interested in what sound does to people: how memory is stamped with music, how sound changes lives, how sound can become home away from home. We take a deliberately broad view of sound. We believe sound is rarely experienced in categories. We listen—not through the ears of the few who call themselves tastemakers, but through the stories of the many. We believe that the stories considered unrelatable by the gatekeepers are deserving of being centered.

Long Play is home of writing around music, podcasts and audiobooks in equal measure. We welcome rage against the algorithm. We welcome rage against noise. We embrace joy, especially the joy of the many.