I got this from another list and thought you'd like to see it.
Rewound
On its 50th birthday, the cassette tape is still rolling By Lily Rothman
Monday, Aug. 12, 2013
Bartholomew Cooke for TIME
The man who invented the compact cassette tape doesn't remember what was
recorded on the very first one, but he does remember what came next. Lou
Ottens, who led the product's development for Philips, recalls the commotion
that occurred when the Dutch company introduced the cassette to the world 50
years ago this month at a 1963 radio exhibition, the Funkausstellung in
Berlin.
"It was a big surprise for the market," Ottens, now 87, says. "It was so
small in comparison with reel-to-reel recorders that it was at that moment a
sensation."
What now seems like a relic was a revolution in a plastic case. Keith
Richards has said he wrote "Satisfaction" in his sleep using the tape
recorder by his bed, which was the only way he remembered it in the morning.
Tapes of Grateful Dead gigs are their own subculture. Cassettes let
underground bands spread punk and DJs disseminate hip-hop. And it wasn't
just music: we listened to books on tape, to recorded notes-to-self and to
the hiss in the silence between tracks, not to mention the mechanical whir
of fast-forward and the alveolar click that says Turn the tape over, hit
play once more. Plenty of people, even now, are still listening.
From the beginning, the tape had a lot going for it. Reel-to-reel technology
wasn't user-friendly: the reel tape was exposed and easily damaged; the
machines were big; threading a tape from one reel to another was
labor-intensive. Ottens' aim was to "make it smaller, make it cheaper and
make it easier to handle." His tape was about half the width of the previous
standard and protected by the cassette cartridge. The whole thing was, as a
Philips press release pointed out, smaller than a pack of cigarettes.
The technology spread quickly. By the end of the '60s, tapes could be played
in cars. National Audio Co. in Springfield, Mo.--the nation's largest
producer of cassettes today--began selling the product. Current president
Steve Stepp, who founded the company with his father in 1969, was confused
the first time a sales rep brought one in. Used to 10-in. metal tape reels,
he thought the cassette was a toy. Now his company churns out an average of
100,000 of them every day. "We're probably selling more audiocassettes than
we've ever sold right now," Stepp says.
Sure, some of National Audio Co.'s success with cassettes is due to lack of
competition. (Philips, for example, no longer makes them.) But that's not
all, says Stepp. Tapes are cheap. Anyone can record anything on them. They
have retro appeal and an appealingly analog sound. They're durable and
portable.
The numbers confirm Stepp's observations. In 1993, Nielsen SoundScan found
rough parity between the CD and the cassette. Although sales of the latter
have declined, 200,000 albums sold on tape in the U.S. in 2012--a fraction
of a percent of the 316 million total albums sold but a 645% increase over
2011 cassette sales. David Bakula of Nielsen's entertainment division says
the tape's advantages (affordability, portability, recordability) keep it
alive.
Evidence of the cassette craze is everywhere. New tape-focused labels have
launched in the past few years, and larger labels are getting in on it too,
with cassette releases this spring from She & Him and MGMT. Filmmakers Seth
Smoot and Zack Taylor crowdfunded a documentary about tapes called Cassette,
now nearly complete. They imagined the film as a eulogy, but before long
they realized the story was about longevity, not death.
One reason for that endurance is people like Mark Bijasa, a collector in
Cerritos, Calif., who owns about 4,000 tapes. His goal is to have three of
each recording: "one to rock, one to stock, one to swap," as he puts it.
Bijasa, 33, grew up around tapes, but it's been less than a decade since he
began hunting them down. He has a cassette-centric Instagram account with
6,000 followers, and as a graphic designer he creates J-cards (the cardboard
inserts that go in tape cases) for record labels. He may even be spreading
the gospel a bit too well. Rarities can now go for hundreds of dollars on
eBay, pricing him out, and he says cassette aisles at record stores are
often picked over before he gets there.
Then there's the mixtape. Mixes changed music history, says Rob Sheffield,
author of Love Is a Mix Tape. "The way that mixtapes became a cultural
institution really influenced the way we listen to music today," he says.
"With a great deal of discouragement from the official music-world
establishment, the audience invented this way to share music."
After all, what is a playlist if not a glorified mixtape, shared on Spotify
or carried on an iPod? Tapes took music from labels and gave it to
listeners, heralding a change in the very meaning of entertainment. That
change has no rewind button. The world won't go back to listening to songs
on an album in the sequence picked by a band, just as the news isn't read in
the order a paper chooses and a TV show isn't watched at the hour it's
broadcast. Mixtape culture thrives even among those for whom the cassette
revival is out of earshot.
Like, ironically enough, Lou Ottens. Even though he invented the cassette,
Ottens listens to most of his music on CD. (Then again, during the 1970s, he
spearheaded the invention of those too.) He feels no nostalgia for the old
format, preferring to look forward rather than back. "The cassette is
history," he says. "I like when something new comes."
_______________________________________________
ATI (Adaptive Technology Inc.)
A special interest affiliate of the Missouri Council of the Blind
http://moblind.org/membership/affiliates/adaptive_technology
