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Home / News / Sharetapes revives the cassette mixtape – with NFC

Sharetapes revives the cassette mixtape – with NFC

Who said cassette tapes were no longer cool? These cassette-shaped NFC tags let you share your playlists in style

We’re sad to say there’s still no need to retrieve your tape collection from the attic just yet but it does appear the trusty music receptacle is making a comeback – sort of. New gadget Sharetapes allow you to save digital playlists in – get this! – a physical form. What do you mean, you don’t know what a cassette is?

So instead of sending someone a link like the impersonal digital person you have become, you can instead ‘record’ a playlist from Spotify, 8tracks, Rdio and even YouTube on the company’s website and add it to one of your Sharetapes. Okay, so they’re not real cassettes – just card replicas with an NFC tag and a QR code – but the thought’s the same.

Now all you do is hand over the tape and the lucky recipient can use NFC or a QR code-reading application to listen to your playlist – and without having to wind the tape in. Best of all, it works for both smartphones and tablets.

Five Sharetapes will set you back US$7 (about £4.50) – but we can’t help but wish that they’d slapped a QR code and an NFC tag on an actual old cassette tape, for the full authentic feel.

[Sharetapes via Design Boom]

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Profile image of Dan Grabham Dan Grabham Editor-in-Chief

About

Dan is Editor-in-chief of Stuff, working across the magazine and the Stuff.tv website.  Our Editor-in-Chief is a regular at tech shows such as CES in Las Vegas, IFA in Berlin and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as well as at other launches and events. He has been a CES Innovation Awards judge. Dan is completely platform agnostic and very at home using and writing about Windows, macOS, Android and iOS/iPadOS plus lots and lots of gadgets including audio and smart home gear, laptops and smartphones. He's also been interviewed and quoted in a wide variety of places including The Sun, BBC World Service, BBC News Online, BBC Radio 5Live, BBC Radio 4, Sky News Radio and BBC Local Radio.

Areas of expertise

Computing, mobile, audio, smart home