‘If you got a tape on, you’re committed’: The revival of cassette tapes in Toronto’s New Wave of Traditional Heavy Metal scene
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract At the height of music digitization and dematerialization, we still find collectivities of people who use obsolete forms of music media not out of necessity, but as a conscious and meaningful choice. This article focuses on a case study of a surprising revival of cassette tapes in the New Wave of Traditional Heavy Metal (NWOTHM) scene in Toronto, Canada. I consider two broad questions. First, if the music of the bands in the scene can be easily downloaded or ripped off of a CD, and conveniently stored on computers and other devices, what is the appeal of cassette tapes for their consumers? And second, what new meanings have been ascribed to cassette tapes in the Toronto NWOTHM scene – has the main function of cassettes as a music storage medium changed entirely? In this article, I (1) propose that Toronto NWOTHM scene members have rekindled an attraction to physical media formats to close the tangibility gap between music and listener; (2) suggest that subjective media associations between various time periods and/or music genres foster the historically informed consumption of cassettes; (3) demonstrate these two points in the traditional heavy metal subculture in Toronto and (4) outline new meanings that cassettes have undertaken in this context, such as souvenir, materialization of subcultural capital and symbol of commitment.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it