Bet on Cassettes Pays Off

Worker checks loaded cassette

Visitors to National Audio Company on East Water Street in Springfield, MO often have one primary question, and their voices carry into President Steve Stepp’s office near the front door.

“I hear them ask, ‘Do people still use audiocassettes?’ Stepp told the news-leader.com during an interview last week. “And the truth is, yes, we ship a 53-foot trailer load every afternoon at 3:15.”

Fifty years after the invention of the audio format, the Springfield company — already the largest manufacturer of them in the country — is seeing orders increase after a decision to double down on production in the latter half of the last decade. 

And that growth is coming from somewhere it hasn’t in decades — major record labels.

When Stepp and his father founded National Audio in 1969, it sold two things — open reel recording tape and broadcast tape cartridges. In the early 1970s, however, an Ampex sales representative who visited the company each month introduced Stepp to the cassette tape.

Soon after, National Audio was in the cassette business.

“We bought one of these loaders, and we could load a C-90 every seven seconds,” Stepp said. “And we thought, ‘We’ll never need a second machine.’”

According to the Springfield, MO News-Leader, they bought their second machine the next year. Within four years, they had 16. And by the late 1980s, Stepp says, the company was the largest producer of blank cassettes in the nation. One single religious ministry headquartered near St. Louis had a standing order for 250,000 blank cassettes a week.

In the 1990s, however, most musically inclined consumers switched to CDs. And many of National Audio’s competitors focused on the newer digital medium as well, Stepp said.

About two or three years ago, something somewhat surprising — even to Stepp — started happening: musical artists started returning to the medium. Independent record labels and indie bands found that the cassette tape was a low-cost way of getting their music before an audience, he said.

“It may not be the size that it was 20 years ago … but it is a growing market,” Stepp said.

Today, Stepp said, National Audio has about 40 employees, and 70 percent of the company’s revenues comes from cassettes — a slight uptick, since CD and DVD sales have declined in recent years.

“The audiocassette remains the backbone of National Audio Company.”

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Springfield News-Leader photo