Inside the 1991 Dubai shop where VHS tapes, Walkmans and cassettes are making a comeback

Dubai: Step into Island Coast Audio, and the shelves seem to go on forever. VHS tapes are stacked from floor to ceiling. Old Disney films sit next to Hollywood classics. Arabic cassette tapes line whole walls, next to stacks of Bollywood films and boxes of CDs. Old VCR players and Walkmans sit on the counter, ready to be sold. The covers are faded in places and the plastic cases a little scratched, but everything is still here, still for sale, still waiting for the right person to walk in. Stepping inside feels like walking into a different decade.

This is the world of Mahmoud Allaham, a Syrian man who has spent just over two decades keeping this shop alive.

From Syria to Dubai

Island Coast Audio has been open since 1991, in the same corner of Dubai. Mahmoud took it over from a previous owner just over twenty years ago, and has kept it running ever since. For years, shops like his were where residents from South Asia and the Arab world came to find entertainment from home, long before anyone could stream a film from their phone. He is proud to call Dubai home. "I am so glad to be in a GCC country, especially in the UAE, in Dubai," he says.

The neighbourhood around him has changed a lot since then. His shelves have not.

When the crash came

For the first decade, business was good. Then, around 2016, streaming and social media arrived, and everything changed. "This work, it fell down. Not 100 per cent, but 90 per cent," Mahmoud says. Friends told him to close the shop and move on. Khalas, they said. Finished. Everyone else, he remembers, was throwing their old cassettes in the bin.

Mahmoud did not. "I had my own vision," he says. "I believed I could continue." So he stayed, kept his shelves full, and waited.

The comeback

Ten years later, Mahmoud says the wait has paid off. "Now, in 2026, the golden time is coming back," he says. "People are falling in love with nostalgia again."

His proof is Michael Jackson. When the new Michael Jackson biopic, Michael, hit cinemas earlier this year, every Michael Jackson cassette in his shop sold out. And it was not old fans buying them. "The people who bought Michael Jackson were 16, 18, 20, up to 30 years old," Mahmoud says. "Michael Jackson passed away in 2009. These people never even saw him. But the golden time is back."

Mahmoud is not the only one seeing this. Across the UAE, a handful of old cassette shops have quietly outlasted the CD, the MP3 and now the streaming app, from Abu Dhabi's Al Balad Audio Cassettes, running since 1986, to newer additions like Dubai's Flipside DXB and homegrown tape label Bastakiya Tapes.

Cassettes have also held on for a very local reason: unlike a CD, a tape does not skip when a car is bouncing over sand dunes, which has made them a small desert driving staple for years. Add in a new generation of Gen Z collectors picking up tapes and vinyl records for the first time, and Mahmoud's shelves start to look less like a relic and more like they were simply waiting for everyone else to catch up. He says vinyl records are seeing the same kind of comeback, along with older ways of listening to music, on a Walkman or a record player, instead of a phone.

What sits on his shelves

Mahmoud's shop still holds just about every Disney classic you can think of, alongside old Hollywood and Bollywood films, some with Arabic subtitles made specially for the region decades ago. He also sells the machines needed to actually play it all: VCRs, DVD players and Walkmans. A tape costs around Dh100. A cassette is closer to Dh15.

For Mahmoud, the shop was never really about the price tag. It is about the feeling. "When people see a cassette from years ago, they feel something in their heart," he says. "Their memory comes back to them."

Step inside Island Coast Audio, and it is easy to see exactly what he means. It is like flashes of my childhood stacked bottom to top. Walking into the store between the Disney tapes and the stacks of Arabic cassettes, a small shop that almost closed in 2016 is quietly proving Mahmoud's belief in analogue and keeping the magic and nostalgia alive.