The Gadget We Miss: The Compact Cassette Tape
A generation used compact cassettes to create mix tapes, creating one of the first battles over music piracy.
Once upon a time, you didn’t message someone on Facebook if you were an awkward teenager in love. Instead, you made them a mix tape. You filled it with the tunes that you liked, in the hope that the recipient would realize how cool you were, and find the hidden message of adoration in the music you chose.
The medium for this teenage heartache was the compact cassette tape, one of the most persistent (and, in its day, controversial) gadgets of the end of the last century.
First announced in 1963 by dutch company Philips, the compact cassette tape was magnetic tape perfected. It was smaller and easier to use than reel-to-reel tape, and was smaller than the rival 8-track. The audio quality of early versions was poor, but improvements in manufacturing meant that by the early 1970s, the quality was as good as vinyl, and compact cassette tapes had one big advantage: you could record to them. By connecting them to a record player and amplifier, you could record the tracks you want from vinyl (or from another compact cassette player), skipping the ones you didn’t.
For our younger readers, we should probably explain what a compact cassette tape is. Each tape holds between 30 and 120 minutes of music, stored on a long tape wound around a supply reel. As it is played, the tape moves past the playback head (held next to the pressure pad on the diagram above) onto another reel. The music is recorded on the top half of the tape. That way, you have two sides: once one side is finished, you eject the tape, flip it over, the tape is wound back and you can play the other side of the tape. On the top of the tape is a write-protect tab: if this is removed, the tape cannot be recorded to (used for pre-recorded albums on tape). However, this could be overcome with the use of a bit of sticky tape.
Philips developed the format and held the patent for the original design of the compact cassette, demoing their system in 1963 and releasing the first model in 1965: the EL 3300.
Initially, Philips wanted to charge a licensing fee, but after discussions with several companies failed over the issue of royalties, decided to allow any manufacturer to get a license for free, to encourage competition and promote the new format. Sony was the first to take up this license, coming out with their first compact cassette player in 1966: the TC-100 “Magazine-matic”.
By the mid-1970s, the compact cassette was firmly established as a format for pre-recorded music, as cassette players had replaced the 8-track player as the preferred format for in-car audio. By the early 1980s, pre-recorded music on cassette sold more than vinyl, and the format seemed to be firmly established.
It is perhaps hard for modern readers to understand the impact that cassette tapes had on this era. Before digital music made shuffling music a simple thing, a well made mix tape provided a way that you could show off your eclectic taste in music and how well you could blend disparate tracks. It was the perfect way to show your musical knowledge and street cred. Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth described the thrill of a well-made mix tape in the intro to his 2005 book Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture:
Around 1980-81, there was a spontaneous scene of young bands issuing singles of super fast hardcore punk… it hit me that I could make a killer mix tape of all the best songs from these records — and since they were all so short and they all had the same kind of sound and energy, the mix tapes would be a monolithic hardcore rush. I made what I thought was the most killer hardcore tape ever. I wrote ‘H’ on one side, and ‘C’ on the other. That night, while we were in bed, and after Kim had fallen asleep, I put the cassette on our stereo cassette player, dragged one of the little speakers over to the bed, and listened to the tape at ultra-low thrash volume. I was in a state of humming bliss. This music had every cell and fiber in my body on heavy sizzle mode. It was sweet.
But, for some, this ability to record to a compact cassette was a problem. Record companies decried the ease with which someone could record an album and give a copy to a friend. Their pronouncements of the impending doom of pre-recorded music were loud and frequent, concluding with a campaign in the mid-1980s under the provocative title “Home Taping is Killing Music”. This campaign was run in the UK by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), a record company industry body. In smaller letters, the slogan of the campaign also declared “and it’s illegal”.
The problem, this campaign maintained, was that people copying songs onto tape were depriving artists of their royalties, which meant that record companies would not be able to pay artists, who wouldn’t be able to record music.
In the US, a similar campaign was organized by the RIAA, whose president Jack Valenti had previously told a congressional hearing that that “the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone”. The rhetoric from the RIAA over music recording was no less forthright, with the RIAA describing piracy as “the scourge of the recording industry”.
Unsurprisingly, these campaigns came in for a certain amount of ridicule. The Dead Kennedys famously produced an album with one blank side, with the message “Home taping is killing record industry profits! We left this side blank so you can help.”. Malcom McLaren proteges Bow Wow Wow produced a single called “C30, C60, C90 Go!” which discussed the joys of home taping, and the single version included a blank side of the tape that you could record your own music on.
In the UK, the BPI and other industry bodies pushed for a solution in the form of a levy on blank cassettes and other media that could be used for copying music. This didn’t get through in the UK or the USA, but it did happen in many European Union countries, where a 2011 report by Professor Martin Kretschmer of Bournemouth University claimed that 22 of the 27 member countries charged a so-called private copying levy. At its peak in 2004, this levy generated €567 million (about $750 million). This charge was levied on any medium that could be used to copy music, movies or other media, including DVD-R discs and external hard drives.
The cassette tape continued to be popular into the 1990s, but new technology increasingly ate away at its market share. Initially, the falling price of recordable CDs and CD burners made CD more popular, as it became easier and cheaper for users to rip CDs they owned and create their own mix tapes and compilations. The rise of MP3 players in the late 1990s and 2000s further ate away at the appeal of cassettes, as you could more easily skip over tracks, and devices like the iPod could hold much more music than a box of cassette tapes.
The compact cassette format had a last hurrah with a digital format called Digital Compact Cassette (DCC). This format was launched in 1992 and offered backwards compatibility with analog cassettes, but added digital quality. Although it had support from a number of manufacturers, it wasn’t a big success, partly due to a cumbersome copy protection system that made it difficult to record music to the tapes, and partly due to the other technologies listed above. In the end, adding a digital version of the compact cassette could not get around the fact that CDs and MP3s were just better.Philips finally gave up on DCC in 1996, although the format still has some fans among audiophiles.
Cassette tapes still have their charms, though. The BBC recently reported on how a Montreal duplication company is doing a brisk business in making cassette tape albums for bands who prize their analog nature. “Clearly MP3s exist” the article quotes small record company owner Craig Proulx as saying...
“I get it. I have an iPhone. But where’s the fun in that?”
What are your memories of cassette tapes? Do you still have your teenage mix tapes?
