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Kickback is offering a blast from the past with its DIY Cassette Kit, giving you everything you need to make the perfect mixtape—and helps to preserve your music to boot.
Physical mediahas been making a comeback. There are a few reasons for this, whether it be data preservation, enjoying a hit of nostalgia, or even enjoying some retro tech you weren’t around for. Whatever the case, though, there’s a lot of appeal in building a collection of media you can pull off the shelf whenever you want. You know what’s even better? The fun of creating old-school mixtapes.
All You Need to Start Recording
The Kickbackis a line of products inspired by retro audio tech, and one of the most interesting products of the line is itscassette recording kit. The kit gives you everything to both record and listen to mixtapes, which is neat. It is clearly meant to invoke the days when you’d carefully choose a selection of songs to invoke a certain feeling—or just for something to listen to in the car. Modern playlists with hundreds of songs (or more) have lost that magic that limited run times would provide. In addition, creating these mixtapes is as simple as plugging the kit into your PC, booting up your playlist, and hitting ‘Record’ on the kit. It’s a modernized way to record and enjoy a nostalgic form of music.
Kickback DIY Mixtape Kit
Kickback’s DIY Mixtape Kit has everything you need to record your own cassettes, whether that is to share your favorite music with your friends, enjoy a bit of audio nostalgia, or to preserve your music collection in a physical form.
Kickback does not offer a similar kit for ripping CDs, though the company does have theRetradisc playerthat makes it easy to listen to any CD-ROMs you do have. Besides, it’s still fairly easy torip your own CDs on your computerwithout the need for kits or additional hardware, aside froma CD driveif your PC is missing one. Cassettes need hardware for recording that’s not as easily available, so a kit like this is extremely helpful for someone just starting out.
But if you’re looking for near-perfect reproductions of your favorite songs as they’d sound on Spotify or another music streaming service, you won’t get that with a cassette.Cassettes have the same appeal as vinylsin that they’re an old-school, nostalgic way to listen to music.
Backup Your Music So You Don’t Lose It
Just as (or maybe more) important, putting music onto cassettes and other physical media means you own it. You can do whatever you want with them, whether you’re using CDs and cassettes to back up your music, to give to other people, or even just enjoying some nostalgia with old-school devices. Companies can’t take away access to a CD or vinyl.
With music, movies, and shows predominantly being on streaming services, you don’t own any of this media and lose access the moment your subscription runs out. Couple that with content being removed or moved to other services, and it leads to issues with just finding the music or shows you want to watch. But the problem extends beyond streaming services.
If you buy any media digitally, youtechnicallyown it, but that doesn’t mean it will be available indefinitely, nor can you be assured that the media will be easy to download in a format that’s easy to use with other sites or devices. Amazon recentlyremoved the ability to download Kindle eBooksto your PC, making it harder to back up your book purchases or even use them with a non-Kindle eReader.
You don’t need to deal with these issues if you have the physical media on hand, so even if building up these collections is more pricey, it’s well worth it for those worried about true ownership of any sort of media, be it music, video games, or TV shows and movies.
Expand Your Collection
If you picked up the Cassette Kit and decided you want to start growing a collection, there are a few options available. It’s pretty inexpensive to get moreblank cassette tapes, so you can make more mixes for yourself or your friends. If you want to go even further, you can look for official cassettes (new and old alike), pick up aboombox, and enjoy more of that nostalgic music experience. Just make sure that if you’re going to start collecting, that isn’t just because you’re following a trend—it’s because you’relegitimately looking for the experience you like the most.
