This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars and this is the sound of well here. I'm gonna play you the sound and if you're old enough you'll be able to identify it right away

That's the sound of a brand new cassette tape being unwrapped and put into a cassette deck. That's my friend and fellow radiotopian Benjamin Walker.

He hosts the show Theory of Everything and he's definitely old enough to know that sound.

Yeah, well, so are you, pal.

Benjamin is sitting in a car, a car that happens to have a tape deck with Andrea Hart, who works with the sub-pop record label.

At first when we started doing the cassettes for every release,

if you're not familiar with sub-pop, it's kind of this small but really mighty record label that has signed some of the best indie bands of the last 30 years.

Nirvana, Slater Kenny, the Postal Service, Beach House, and Andrea has a job at Subpop that a lot of people

might not imagine exists at a modern record label.

I work at Subpop Records doing cassette production. It's crazy, I just don't think I've even held a cassette in my hand for a long time.

This job, handling cassette production at Somepop, it disappeared completely for a while.

But recently record stores and distributors

have been requesting subpop to release their titles on cassette and subpop asked Andrea

to oversee the operation.

As of 2016, the plan is for every new release is to get a, is to get a cassette release.

I don't like nostalgia for the sake of it.

And it's clear to me why cassettes have been replaced now a couple of times over by more convenient

mediums, mediums where you can actually skip tracks and you don't have to

rewind when you're done listening.

But I do think there are a lot of good things about the cassette.

First off, you can fix a messed up cassette with some patience and a pencil.

Plus, there's never been a better way to make a mix.

...