Lady Gaga’s Chromatica was the best-selling cassette album in the UK this year. Gaga’s May release saw off competition from 5 Seconds of Summer’s Calm, Yungblud’s Weird, The 1975’s Notes From A Conditional Form and Blackpink’s The Album to top the tape charts in a surprise bumper year for the retro format.
Who’s buying Dua Lipa, Lady Gaga and 5SOS on tape?
Cassette sales have doubled this year, with Lady Gaga’s Chromatica taking top spot.https://t.co/XyS9lMLNby
— BBC Newsbeat (@BBCNewsbeat) December 29, 2020
Even in the midst of one of the most unpredictable years the music industry has faced, few would have predicted a renaissance of the cassette. Nevertheless, tape sales increased by a staggering 103% in the UK market throughout 2020. The British Phonographic Industry project that 157,000 tapes will have been sold in the UK by close of play on December 31st, making 2020 the best year for cassette sales since 2003, when 243,000 tapes were sold. For context, the best-selling cassette album that year was Now 54 (some 53 Now compilations ago) which included tracks by Girls Aloud, Atomic Kitten and Mel C as well as Moscow duo t.A.T.u; Popstars: The Rivals winners One True Voice and inaugural Fame Academy champion David Sneddon.
In an interview with BBC News, Tallulah Webb of London-based independent label Sad Club Records described cassettes as the “way forward for DIY artists.” Webb acknowledged that the format’s return was partly-powered by a hipster audience looking for social media likes (“Some people are probably buying it to take pictures of it and put it on Instagram”) but also argued that a deeper longing for an escape from the instant gratification culture of streaming services was behind the unexpected comeback. She said “I think people genuinely like the format. The amount of times I listen to a playlist on Spotify, and I skip a song… And then you put a cassette on, and you can’t skip it. There is something really nice about that.”
While cassette sales still represent an incredibly small proportion of the UK music market – streaming services still account for a whopping 80% of the field – the surprise growth of the format this year was part of a wider resurgence in physical record sales. Indeed, a fifth of all album sales in Britain this year were vinyl records (some 4.8 million), making 2020 the thirteenth consecutive year that the sales of the much-loved format grew in the UK.
The best-selling vinyl album this year was the remastered version of Fleetwood Mac’s masterpiece Rumours. The transatlantic rockers’ iconic LP continues to bewitch listeners 43 years on from its release, and even gained a sizeable new clutch of teenage fans this year thanks to the success of a viral TikTok video featuring the band’s classic hit Dreams. New releases featuring in the end-of-year vinyl albums chart included Kylie Minogue’s Disco - which Clash described as “sheer escapism from start to finish” and “an exit point from the darkness that has fallen over 2020” – and AC/DC’s Power Up, which became the year’s fastest-selling album following its release in November.
Lady Gaga’s success in the annual cassette charts with Chromatica serves as another string to the bow of an album which had already attained a BPI Gold certification in the UK and topped the year-end Billboard Dance and Electronic Albums chart in the chameleonic artist’s native USA. NME described the record as a “pure pop celebration from an icon in a world of her own“; while Variety hailed it as a “rock-solid foundation for the next phase of (Gaga’s) remarkable career.”
