In conjunction with RSD Black Friday, RTM—the worldwide leader in reel-to-reel tape manufacturing—and ThinkIndie Distribution are reissuing a series of critically acclaimed albums on cassette for the first time ever. Alanis Morissette’ Such Pretty Forks in the Road and Giovannie and the Hired Guns’ Bad Habits will make their debut on cassette, along with My Morning Jacket’s much beloved Holiday offering, My Morning Jacket Does Xmas Fiasco Style. The releases will be available at participating indie record stores beginning November 25; see recordstoreday.com for additional info on RSD Black Friday titles and stores.
The albums will be reissued on RTM’s RTM C-60 high quality audio cassette tape, offering best-in-its-class sound quality in an analog cassette. The cassettes will also come in environmentally-friendly packaging.
In addition to the album releases, RTM is set to launch their new B-1000EW Portable Cassette Player as part of RSD Black Friday. With electronics by RTM, the new player retains the built-in microphone and external microphone recording of their previous B-1000 model, along with an expanded window, USB power adapter and more. The Vinyl Factory recently hailed the B-1000 as one of the best portable cassette players on the market, noting that it is “a modern-made cassette player that allows you to focus on the music.”
The Record Store Day Black Friday cassette reissues come on the heels of RTM and ThinkIndie’s previous, highly successful cassette-only reissue series which have featured critically acclaimed titles from a wide array of artists including Sturgill Simpson, Major Lazer, Maren Morris, Built To Spill, John Prine, Lupe Fiasco & Kaelin Ellis, The Mavericks, Jamie Lidell, Suzanne Vega and many more, as well as RTM/ThinkIndie’s first release of an LP of new/previously unreleased music, Patty Griffin’s TAPE.
RTM’s Jean-Luc Renou and ThinkIndie’s Scott Register discussed the reissues, as well as plans for future series, with Billboard; read the interview HERE. Additionally, RTM CMO Neal Birnie recently discussed the newfound popularity of cassettes with No Depression HERE.
As all analog music formats (vinyl, cassette, reel-to-reel, etc.) continue to rise in popularity, cassette tapes now outpace all other formats—including vinyl—in consumer-market growth, more than quadrupling since 2011. Artists including Eminem, Jack White, Taylor Swift, Jay-Z, Sufjan Stevens, Lana Del Rey, Muse and Ty Segall have all released recent albums on cassette, and RTM has previously partnered with New York-based Dala Records for a limited edition Record Store Day mixtape.
With the rise in demand for analog music cassettes, RTM’s new compact analog cassette tape is the first newly produced cassette on the market to offer high quality audio in analog format, ideal for listening, recording and archiving. The cassette tape is manufactured using legendary chemical formulas from BASF at the RTM facility in Normandy, France. It can be played on any standard compact cassette player, generally available at high-end audio stores and big-box stores nationwide.
