How Cassette Tapes Are Made: Inside a Japanese Cassette Factory

How cassette tapes are made, start to finish. I flew to Japan and spent a day inside Cassette Express, one of the few factories still manufacturing cassettes at this scale anywhere in the world. Endo walked me through the entire process. Tape duplication, shell loading, J-card and O-card printing, on-body printing, and the shell colour library they pull from for custom runs. If you love physical media and you have ever wondered where a cassette actually comes from, this is the whole thing on camera. We also toured the Cassette Express showroom in Shibuya and sat down to talk about cassette culture in Japan. Endo runs Cassette Week Japan, the yearly festival that puts Japanese and international artists releasing on tape in front of a wider audience. Cassette Express is run by Side-B Creations, with production at the IDmagnetech plant in Sagamihara, Kanagawa. They take orders from outside Japan. ORDER YOUR OWN CASSETTES Cassette Express: https://cassette-express.com/quotation/ Side-B Creations:   / sidebcreations   CASSETTE STORE WEEK JAPAN https://cassettestoreday.jp/ FOLLOW Andrew Tapehead:   / andrew.tapehead   Throne Age Records: https://www.throneage.com COMMON QUESTIONS Are cassette tapes still made? Yes. New tape is being manufactured and duplicated right now, and demand has been climbing since the early 2020s. Who still makes cassette tapes? A small number of plants worldwide. National Audio Company in Springfield, Missouri is the name most people know in the US. In Japan, the line in this video runs at IDmagnetech in Sagamihara, Kanagawa. How are cassette tapes made? Bulk tape is wound onto pancakes, duplicated at high speed, loaded into shells, printed, and packaged with a J-card or O-card. You see every one of those stages in this video. #cassetteculture #physicalmedia #cassettetape