You Can't Make a Cassette Tape Into a Shiv

That's good news for Bob Paris, a North Hollywood businessman who is making a fortune selling the now technologically ancient music format to prisoners (h/t Evangelical Outpost):

Cassette tapes may be dead. There may be no nostalgists who lyrically pine for the days of tape, no audiophiles who swear by the purity of the format. But tape still has its place in the world. There are perks to the obsolescent format.

For one thing, unlike CDs, the money in cassette tapes is not plummeting because of audio downloads. According to Bob Paris, owner of North Hollywood's Pack Central, a mail-order business exclusively dedicated to selling cassette tapes: . "[Five years ago], people thought I was nuts when I invested tons of money in analog prerecorded music on tape." Now? Paris' business steadily brings in a million dollars a year.

But who is buying Paris' cassettes? America's 2.3 million prisoners. Which brings us to the second advantage of tape over compact disc: a tape can't be broken apart and used as a shiv. Prisoners are allowed to have them. 60% of Paris' business is in cassette tapes.

Paris' excited conclusion: "[By selling cassette tapes] I have dodged every conventional bullet that has hit most music retailers," Paris says. "I don't have to worry about downloading, legal or illegally. The beauty of it is that prisoners don't have Internet access and never will."

I've spent 35 years in the gospel music business (my first four recordings were on vinyl records) and have sold more than a few cassettes, but like most artists, stopped producing them...sort of...when CDs swept the market and my customers finally caught up with the technology (they tend to be older and are not early adopters of new-fangled gadgets). Cassettes can still be money-makers, though.

One day a few years ago I decided to go through our bus and clean out stuff we no longer needed, and in the process found bunches of cassettes that had been stuck on unused bunks or in the corners of our storage bays. We'd stopped putting them on our sales table, but I didn't want to just throw them away. I borrowed an idea from another group and took the four different cassettes we had and put them in a single shrink-wrapped package and offered it for $20 (we used to sell cassettes for $10 apiece). Even at $5 per tape we could still make money and if nothing else we could get rid of the inventory and pocket a few bucks at the same time.

I had enough tapes to make up 50 of these four-packs and shipped them to Texas for our annual Rockport trip. I got up that Friday night and announced the cassette special, figuring that a few people would take advantage of it and was shocked by the response. By 3 o'clock the next afternoon (it was a three-day event) all 50 packs were gone and I had a wad of $20's in my change envelope. The lightbulb came on and I contacted our manufacturer and immediately ordered up a bunch more cassettes packaged the same way. We continued to sell them for several years and I still have about 30 or so of the packs left (of the several hundred we've ordered).

I found a good way to market them in the concerts. During the record pitch I hold up the four-pack and say "if you're car is already paid for...." (pause for laughter) "...you probably have a cassette player in it and here's a good way to get lots of music for very little money." It works every time.

The demand has finally dropped off enough that we're now selling what's left at the concerts for $10 per pack just to get rid of them (and still making money on them). I had about 35 packs in Rockport this year and when I announced the price cut they were gone in about 30 minutes. They're too bulky and not enough of a profit at $10 to keep making them, but it was fun while it lasted.