Do old cassettes sell with Fulfillment by Amazon? Yes.

Here’s a trick that took me awhile to figure out, which I’m passing on to you: You can sell cassettes via FBA, and people will buy them. But you can save yourself huge amounts of time if you know what genres to look for.

For cultural reasons that are beyond my ability to understand, there are certain musical genres the fans of which still buy cassettes. I.e. there are types of music where cassettes are still “cool.” And I’ve figured out two of them.

They are:

• Hip hop
• Heavy metal

When I’m at a thrift store and I’m looking at a bin with 500 cassettes, I’m scanning for fonts / layout that indicates the tape is from one of these two genres. Both have vastly disproportionate number of releases that have held their value in the cassette format.

I don’t know why this is. I just know that around half the time I scan a release in either of these genres, its worth money.

And how obscure the artists is doesn’t seem to matter. By far the biggest “heavy metal” band (if you can even call them that) is Metallica, yet every single one of their releases (that I’ve found) is worth money on cassette.

No one is getting rich off this, but its a great way to give yourself that “10% edge” over your competition.