We Are Rewind has spent the last few years making a bet that sounded absurd in 2020: that people would pay real money for a brand-new cassette player. It worked well enough to fund a boombox and a set of headphones. Now the French outfit is cashing in some of that credibility on a Pink Floyd edition of its flagship WE-001 player — and, more interestingly, on the tape it comes wrapped around.
The limited-edition pack is available now at €179 / £159 / $199. Inside is a specially remastered cassette of The Dark Side of the Moon, which We Are Rewind says is exclusive to this box and is the only cassette version of the album’s 50th anniversary remaster in existence. That’s the part collectors will actually chase. Cassette players are replaceable; a tape that exists nowhere else is not.
A 1979 format with 2026 plumbing
The hardware is the same WE-001 that earned the company its following, which is to say it’s a cassette player that has quietly absorbed most of the modern conveniences. There’s Bluetooth 5.1 for pushing audio to wireless headphones, speakers or a soundbar, a rechargeable battery good for around 12 hours, an aluminium body with metal buttons, a 3.5mm headphone output fed by an amplifier the company designed specifically for cassette playback, and line-in recording for anyone who still wants to make a mixtape. There’s an optional belt clip, too, if you want to commit to the bit properly.
We Are Rewind quotes an upgraded frequency response of 30 Hz – 14,500 Hz ± 3 dB. That’s respectable for the format and roughly meaningless against any streaming service, which is rather the point. Nobody is buying this for measurements.
Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, asked to bless the thing, delivered the driest quote of the year. “I still have enormous affection for the cassette. It really was a major breakthrough — not only with the Sony Walkman but with some of the more up-market recorders,” he said. “I still have my Nakamichi on the shelf and look forward to testing it with the new The Dark Side of the Moon cassette. Am I correct in assuming that the next major issue will be The Dark Side of the Moon in a large package consisting of the album divided up into 78 RPM discs?”
Founder and CEO Romain Boudruche took the earnest line, framing the album as “a continuous piece of sonic art” and the company’s role as “helping preserve the physical album experience.”
The comeback is real, but it’s small
The numbers We Are Rewind leans on are genuine: US cassette sales rose 17.5% year over year, and UK sales jumped 53% after a decade of consistent growth. What those percentages hide is the base. Cassette is growing from a rounding error, and most of that volume is artists using tapes as merch rather than anyone rebuilding a listening habit around them.
Which is fine. The WE-001 has never really been a fidelity argument — it’s a ritual you can hold, sold to people who already own Dark Side in three other formats. Pairing it with a tape they can’t get anywhere else is, commercially, a very tidy piece of work.
