U.S. cassette sales more than doubled in the first quarter of 2025 compared with a year earlier, and the music-data firm Luminate projected the format would clear 600,000 units sold by the end of the year, according to AARP’s reporting on that data. Six hundred thousand tapes isn’t a blip. It’s a format nobody expected to outlive the iPod finding a second act.

Key Points

• U.S. cassette sales more than doubled in Q1 2025 versus the prior year, with Luminate projecting over 600,000 units for the full year, per AARP.
• Cassette sales climbed roughly 443% between 2015 and 2022, according to Luminate figures reported by Billboard.
• National Audio Company in Springfield, Missouri — the country’s largest cassette manufacturer — produces an estimated 25 to 30 million tapes a year, and buyers under 35 are its biggest customer group, according to NPR and Smithsonian Magazine.
• Taylor Swift, Megan Thee Stallion and Maren Morris are among the mainstream artists who’ve pressed recent releases to cassette, Billboard reports.

Most of that supply runs through one Missouri warehouse. National Audio Company has been duplicating tape since 1968, and it survived the CD era by making audiobooks while nearly every other cassette plant in the country shut down, according to NPR. It’s now the last company left that manufactures its own magnetic recording tape on U.S. soil, a capability it rebuilt in 2018 after its overseas suppliers dried up, per Smithsonian Magazine. That’s a strange kind of vindication for a format the industry buried three separate times.

Set the current wave next to the format’s actual peak and it looks small fast. Cassettes overtook vinyl in 1984, when they accounted for more than half of all album shipments to U.S. retailers, and sales kept climbing until they hit roughly 450 million units near the end of the decade, per historical industry figures cited by Billboard. A few hundred thousand units in 2025 is a rounding error against that number. It’s also, by recent standards, a real trend line and not a novelty spike.

What’s driving it looks less like audiophile nostalgia and more like the instinct fueling vinyl’s own rebound: something to hold that a streaming subscription can’t take back. National Audio’s own customer data backs that up directly — buyers under 35 make up its single largest segment, not collectors old enough to remember mixtapes the first time, according to NPR. Add in limited runs from artists like Swift and Megan Thee Stallion, and cassettes have become one more format young collectors chase precisely because it’s finite.

Vinyl already crossed $1 billion in U.S. revenue in 2025 for the first time since 1983, with unit sales up 7.9% to 46.8 million, according to the RIAA’s own year-end report. Cassettes aren’t chasing that kind of number, and they probably never will again. But the format streaming was supposed to erase for good is instead quietly restocking.