Why does old audio equipment boom?

Mars Tapes in Manchester is the last UK store to sell music on cassette tape in the UK, according to co-owner Alex Tadros.

Business is booming: “When the Oasis Tour was announced we sold almost everything from Oasis. Everything flew,” he says.

Cassettes containing 1980s music are also popular, particularly Kate Bush, which Mr Tadros says may be due to her music appearing in the hit Netflix show Stranger Things.

“We get a mix of clients,” he says. “A lot of them are customers in their 20s, teenagers, coming into this business for the first time, and then a few people who have cassette tapes in their 40s and 50s and buy them for the nostalgia vibe.

“But the majority are under 30. We have a lot of teenagers who come with their parents.”

Store brand cassette players are also very popular.

“People were coming in to buy their first cassette players,” Mr. Tadros says.

The active business at Mars Tapes is part of a broader trend of people buying and repairing vintage music equipment.

Between 2020 and 2024, Google searches for “CD player repair near me” increased by 23%, while searches for “audio equipment repair near me” increased by 91%, according to trend data sourced by software company SEMRush.

Report from Statista It predicts that the global electronics repair services market is expected to double in size from $122bn (£96bn) in 2021 to $240bn (£190bn) in 2033.

So why are some music lovers looking for alternatives to digital music services?

Modern Bluetooth speakers, earphones, and headphones may lack the cachet of older equipment.

“The market is saturated with devices that offer low price and luxury, but provide a sterile, impersonal experience,” says Sarah Dodge, director of strategic design at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

“When you repair an item, you feel more connected to it, so people may be drawn to a more empowering and rewarding ownership experience.”

For Mark Maher, repairing electrical equipment was a hobby, but increasing demand prompted him to quit his job as director of a multinational power transmission equipment company in September to focus on it full-time.

In fact, demand was “so out of control” that Mr Maher shut down the contact section of his website.

“There is definitely a growing trend in repairing old audio equipment,” says Maher, of his company Burton Electronics in the West Midlands.

“People want to bring back all kinds of things, like Sony Walkmans, radio tapes, portable CD players that they had and loved when they were teenagers. There’s a lot of nostalgia there.”

He says people are restoring old audio equipment they bought on platforms like Ebay. “Things were certainly better built back then, and are more repairable than the latest equipment.”

He believes it’s also in demand “because there’s a real shortage of people who can fix things,” he says.

Mr. Maher also runs a YouTube channel called Mend it Mark, which has nearly 100,000 subscribers.

Revamped tech marketplace Back Market says its audio equipment category has jumped an average of 123% year over year since launching on the platform in 2016.

She says record players are her best-selling products among vintage audio technology.

At The Repair Factory, a repair center in Camden, London, Dermot Jones, director of innovation and development, says audio equipment makes up a high proportion of the repairs the organization carries out through its doors.

“We get a little bit of everything,” Jones says. “Old cassette tapes, CD players, headphones, amplifiers, as well as turntables. The good thing about old equipment is that it was kind of the last [longer]you can find out the specifications, and there are service manuals available for many until the 1980s.

With some audio equipment, you can even open the box and inside there is a diagram [of how it looks inside]even with arrows pointing to the screw; It is well designed.

These days, he says, electrical equipment seems like it’s “designed to break.”

“It’s hard to be designed to be open and fixated; it’s not designed at all,” Jones adds. It was designed and assembled so quickly that no one thought it would break. Manufacturers have kept this knowledge rather than sharing it. Our repairmen will have an easier time fixing things [if they did]”.

Ms Dodge says the move to reform supports the shift to a circular economy, a system in which materials never become waste and nature is replenished.

“One of the principles of the circular economy is to keep products in use, with the highest usefulness and value, for as long as possible. The idea is that if you take a product like a CD player and send it to a landfill, it becomes waste.

“Even if you recycle it, and bring it back to its physical level, you strip away all the energy that went into turning that material into a CD player in the first place.”

Reviving old music equipment can bring back special memories.

In the run-up to Christmas last year, Mike Hammond was inspired to organize a memorable gift for his wife of more than 50 years.

Dust was gathering in the loft, where there was a tape recorder his wife, Ellen, had received from her parents as a gift in 1960, when she was just 10 years old. The problem was it was broken.

“I would never give it up,” says Hammond, who lives in Sedsdon, near Wolverhampton. “There was a lot of history [associated with it]”.

He found Mr. Maher who fixed it in time for Christmas.

On Christmas Day, Mr. Hammond asked Ellen to go to the utility room where she found the record player playing one of their favorite records, The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night.

He told me that Ellen’s reaction was worth it.

“There were tears,” says Ellen. “It was really emotional. Some of my cousins ​​visited me and said, ‘Oh my God, we remember coming to your house and seeing this record player.’