The Rise and Fall of the Cassette

The compact cassette, sometimes referred to as the standard cassette or simply cassette, is a familiar sight to anyone who has grown up in the 70s and 80s, but how many of us really know where they came from? Many of us remember our first car, floor mats lost in a shallow sea of tape singles and albums. They defined a generation, in the same way that the MP3 and other digital formats are defining generation Y.

Reel-to-reel recorders were one of the most prevalent ways of recording sound in the late fifties, but they weren’t practical, affordable, or portable enough for the average consumer to find useful.

Numerous companies tried to create a cartridge that could play back prerecorded sounds, until the 8-track found its market in the mid 60s. The medium was far more portable and resistant to damage than vinyl records, but suffered numerous technical and design problems that kept the eight-track from eventually dominating records in the music market.

During this time, the cassette tape was slowly refined into a medium that was not only the most durable mode of music transportation, but also small and affordable to produce. The original compact cassettes were known for having relatively low sound quality, but this improved during the seventies and eighties, when the medium began to rival the older music formats. By the late seventies it had become a rival of the vinyl record as a means of playing music, due to the fact that the cassette could be re-recorded.

The Cassette Catches On

The early recorders and players were not well suited to music, however. They were intended for dictation the same way the microcassette after it was.  The late sixties saw very little in the way of music cassette tapes and it wasn’t until 1971 that high fidelity compact music cassette tapes became a viable means for distributing new music.

In the 1980s however, the cassette tape grew in popularity because of the portable Sony Walkman which was introduced in 1979. This portable tape player revolutionized the way people listened to music, and cassette sales finally overcame long playing vinyl records.

The ease with which one could record and pass on the music made the compact cassette a tool for political change. During this time western influences in Russia were marked as contraband, but the cassette made it possible for punk and rock music to reach the ears of young people and created an opportunity for the eventual end of the Cold War. Another example is the dissemination of political propaganda in audio cassette form by Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran before the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

For a short time, cassettes were even used in data transfer for computers. Along with the 5 1/4 inch floppy drive discs, which were slightly more expensive, cassettes were used to store programs for 8-bit computers (upwards of 60MB by the late 80’s) from the late seventies through the middle of the 80s. This was especially popular outside of the United States, in particular the UK where it remained in use through the early 90s.

During the 1990s, the prerecorded audio cassette tapes fell into a sharp decline. The compact disc was beginning to take more and more of the market away from cassettes.  This decline was most notable in the year 2001 when the total sale of all compact cassettes accounted for only four percent of the overall music sales for all of the United States. All major record labels and music companies had abandoned the format by 2003.

The audio cassette tape was still a viable medium for some time during the 90s, as it was still a superior format for car stereo systems. Audio cassettes were not only more resistant to heat and dust, but the motion of automobiles and bumps in the road would cause compact disc players of the time to skip.

It wasn’t until the year 2000 when shock proof buffering technology allowed manufacturers to replace audio tapes with compact disc technology as the preferred medium in automobiles.  

Even into the new millennium the audio cassette still remained part of the market as a home for the audio book. Still today, many publishers offer “books on tape” in cassette tape format, but audio books on CD now dominate.

Blank cassettes are still available today, and while growing steadily scarcer, the players and recorders are still featured on many Hi-Fi systems. Recording facilities for mass producing recorded content are still around and independent rock and punk groups often sell their music in compact cassette form. The cassette tape has begun to develop something of a cult following – although not at the same level as has vinyl. The compact cassette may now be widely regarded as a piece of history, and it may not be the most popular medium, but its use will continue running parallel to mainstream formats for a while.