The nostalgia industry is back with another blast from the past.

I had a Walkman as a kid. I also had cassettes of my favourite bands and kept a pencil on hand to wind the damn tape back into the cassette when it unravelled.

This happened more often than you’d think, which is why we were all so relieved when CDs became a thing.

People who probably aren’t old enough to remember cassettes, though, think they’re retro-cool, which is why this is happening:

According to The Verge, the Ninm ‘It’s OK’ cassette player is a response to the rise in cassette sales, which were somehow up almost 19% year over year in 2018.

It’s sort of what a portable cassette player like an original Walkman would be if Sony continued to develop tape-based tech in 2019.

So while the It’s OK does the usual tape things, like playing cassettes or letting you record to tapes, it also bills itself as the world’s first Bluetooth 5.0 portable cassette player (a claim of such niche specificity that it seems to be true).

It allows you to listen to your favorite jams with wireless headphones or even link it to a Bluetooth speaker, should you wish.

You achieve the same thing with an iPod or smartphone.

Just like the old Walkmans, the thing runs on AA batteries, and requires you to cart around a bag full of cassette tapes.

Ninm is selling the It’s OK for an early Kickstarter price of $75, in either pink, white, or navy blue colors (the last of which feels specifically designed to evoke the original Sony Walkman TPS-L2). Delivery is estimated for December. The company will also include a blank tape with each It’s OK, operating under the likely correct assumption that most people don’t have tapes lying around in 2019.

The reality is it’s probably going to do really well.

If you’d like to cash in on the inevitable trend, you can always dig through some old boxes for those cassettes, wind the tape back in, and sell them online.

Does anyone want a copy of ‘Backstreet’s Back’ at 10 times what I paid for it in 1999?

[source:verge]