We spend eight hours a day staring at screens, sitting in calls, and carefully sculpting sentences across a page. But nobody is just their job title. We contain multitudes. The colleague reviewing your drafts might be an award-winning poet, a competitive baker, or building physical worlds on the weekend.
Still, it’s always a delight when the curtain pulls back. By day, Will Salmon is our Collections Editor. He's also a veteran music journalist, a long-time collector and the founder of Modern Aviation, an underground indie tape label releasing physical cassettes to a devoted subculture of music lovers.
Making album art a thing again
When I asked Will what originally sparked his jump from writing about music to launching a physical label, his answer didn't start with sound, it started with environment and visual design.
"For Modern Aviation, it was partly an aesthetic thing. A couple of my friends were putting out tapes and I got excited about the visual possibilities. I was living near an airport at the time and obsessed with the planes flying by every hour — the two things merged in my head."
On Spotify, cover art is reduced to a 50-pixel thumbnail tucked behind a glass screen. You don't hold it, turn it over, or collect its spines on a shelf. By treating the cassette as a canvas first, labels like Modern Aviation turn an album into something displayable.
Originally, Will said that the label was going to be called Aileron, which is a bit rubbish as a title. Then Modern Aviation popped up and away they went.
"My friend Sarah Matthews, who is a really talented artist, has done almost all our covers," Salmon said. "We came up with the idea of giving each tape a plane silhouette on the spine, rather than a catalogue number. I knew it was going to be predominantly electronic and maybe a bit folky, and that's how it all panned out."
That detail, swapping out utilitarian catalog numbers for tiny plane silhouettes, is precisely where physical media wins back ground from streaming.
On Spotify or Apple Music, cover art is reduced to a 50-pixel thumbnail tucked behind a glass screen. You don't hold it, turn it over, or collect its spines on a shelf. By treating the cassette as a canvas first, labels like Modern Aviation turn an album into something displayable.
The anti-Spotify
But beyond the visual appeal, there’s also the question of attention span. In a culture driven by endless algorithmic feeds, making a physical commitment to an album has become rare. I asked Will if he thinks people are turning to tapes to escape the paralysis of infinite choice.
It's also not an either/or situation. Most labels like Modern Aviation do everything through Bandcamp, where you generally get a digital download along with the tape.
"People sometimes find the choice of a streamer like Spotify overwhelming and enjoy the focus that comes with sitting down with a complete album," said Salmon.
"That's a big part of the vinyl resurgence, people choosing to engage with the ritual of picking out an album, putting it on, and listening in full. Tapes are a smaller version of that: they're more utilitarian, cheap to produce, and easy to carry around."
"Many of the people who buy our tapes are doing it because they want a tangible object for their money, something to collect," Salmon said.
Will points out something essential here: tape collecting isn't about rejecting modern tech. The physical tape feeds the collector's soul, while the digital download covers convenience. The cassette isn't competing with streaming, it's offering the tactile joy of vinyl without the expensive barrier to entry.
The craft and the cassette
Running an independent label in a digital ecosystem comes with its own set of production realities. Major record labels have clogged vinyl manufacturing plants worldwide, creating year-long delays for small artists. Cassettes, by contrast, remain quick to produce, intimate, and democratic.
Will explains: "Records generally take months to press and costs thousands... They're cheaper to make and sell than vinyl and there's a much faster turnaround – you can get an album pro-dubbed, with printed covers and cases made in a few weeks... They're a great way to get music, art, and ideas out there quickly."
This low-friction production model is what gives tape culture its community feel. It mirrors the lineage of zines, as noted by Will, and mixtape trading from decades past, a community existing entirely outside the algorithmic recommendation engine.
People sometimes find the choice of a streamer like Spotify overwhelming and enjoy the focus that comes with sitting down with a complete album. Tapes are a smaller version of that: they're more utilitarian, cheap to produce, and easy to carry around.
Will Salmon, Modern Aviation
When you buy a tape on Bandcamp, you're usually buying directly from the person who dubbed the tape, stamped the shell, and packed the envelope. There’s an intimacy to that transaction that streaming platforms just can't duplicate.
It’s easy to dismiss the cassette revival as mere nostalgia, but it actually highlights a fundamental shift in how we value art. When music is infinitely accessible, it easily slips into background noise. Something to drown out the silence while tabbing between spreadsheets.
A cassette, by its very limitation, asks for your presence. You can't shuffle it, you can't skip past a weak track with a quick swipe, and eventually, the tape stops and forces you to flip it over. Sometimes that little bit of extra effort is what brings the music back into focus. Ultimately, it is a rejection of the mainstream algorithmic churn.
"I don't think any of this is a nostalgic fad," Salmon emphasized, "it's more that people are realising that they have more options available and that there's interesting stuff happening just off the beaten path."
What’s the one piece of music gear from your past you wish you’d never thrown away? (A favorite Walkman, a vintage deck, or an old tape rack?) Share your throwback tech in the comments!
Follow Tom's Guide on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!
More from Tom's Guide
