Cassette Tapes On The Wane

jonerik writes "The BBC has an article on the current status of the once-popular cassette tape in the UK and elsewhere. It's been a long climb up and a long fall down for the audio format introduced by Dutch electronics giant Philips in 1963. Having sold 83 million units in the UK at their 1989 peak, cassettes sold just 900,000 units in the UK last year. And yet the cassette soldiers on in the West in niche applications - particularly in the audio book market - and in other countries where CD and MP3 penetration hasn't been as extensive. From the article: 'Keith Joplin, a Director of Research at the International Federation of Phonographic Industries, said that Turkey still sells 88 million cassettes a year, India 80 million, and that cassettes account for 50% of sales in these countries. In Saudi Arabia, it is 70%.'"

Comments

old school

[bad_outlook]

Cassettes, and even Cassette-singles - a short lived 45 type of try - were so cool back in the day. Get a good Nakamichi tape deck (dragon anyone?) and keep the tapes out of the sun and you had some great quality. Plus, once CDs came out, tapers went nuts getting most of the quality (cds at that time were not well done) at almost no cost. Tape decks were the standard in cars, as most people still have them in any car > 10 years old.

I hope that anything that out'dos CDs come back to a smaller, more portable format as the cassettes, but not their penchance for falling apart after too much sun.

bo

Sum

[823723423]

[1]
The music industry itself, however, remained concerned about cassettes, in particular the ability of people to record music on them

[2]
However, while cassettes are disappearing quickly from the music stores, they are clinging on in the UK in bookshops

[3]
However, terms such as fast forward, rewind, record and pause, everyday words bequeathed to us from the tape era, ensure that in the English language at least, the legacy of the cassette will survive

Music?

[geophile]

You can store music on them? That's cool.

I used to use them for mass storage on a TRS-80. And my 4.77 MHz, 16k IBM PC supported cassette storage. Didn't need it though, thanks to the two 5" floppy drives, which stored, I believe, a total of 720k.

Cassette product for the future

[Laz10]

I have seen that you can get adapters for connecting a MP3 player through the cassette via. a "adapter tape".

What I don't understand is why nobody makes a cassette that contains a tiny MP3 player and eats a memory stick.

Cool product for all us who a not blessed with the latest and greatest in car-radios and also don't want a portable MP3 player.

Audio Books

[NetSettler]

Audio books have all seemed to be switching over to CD-ROM, but it makes me sad. I don't really care about ultra-high fidelity when being read a book. What I do care about is not having it lose my place when I have to stop the car, etc. I rarely stop on a chapter boundary. And it's rare for audio players to remember the CD's their position well under all the circumstances they need to in order to make Audio Books on CD really work.

So I don't doubt there's been a decline in cassette audio books even--it's obvious at the stores. But I think it's premature, at least for that genre.

Re:Audio Books

[Longstaff]

My new Sony DVD player has a 40 disc memory for this; I'd like to think the same thing will make its way to car decks if it's not already there.

the lost art of the mix tape

[CoffeeJedi]

A friend and i were just discussing the mix tapes of our youth the other day. When you'd strive to make sure the song was cut in EXACTLY. How you'd try to fill to the exact end of the tape. How you could fill in with sound effects from tv shows. Waiting for hours for your favorite song to come on the radio, then carefully editing around the dj chatter. Giving or recieving a mixtape as a gift really MEANT something.

CD's are just too easy, a few minutes on P2P or the iTunes store, and you're done. You kids don't know how good you got it! We had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to get to the tape recorder, and.....

You cannot go tape-dropping without casettes...

[salimfadhley]

http://hellebore.aa.stodge.org/episode8.html This guy makes an art-form out of purposefully discarding casettes full of strange and alarming music; He calls what he does tape-dropping, and while technically the same thing can be done with CDs, he appreciates the rough-seedy aspect of casette-tapes.

Re:You cannot go tape-dropping without casettes...

[Rorschach1]

Speaking of dropping tapes, we once had a DLT 4 tape go bad, so out of boredom I pried the cover off and wedged the corner of the cartridge in one of the ceiling panels so that the tape could freely despool.

Now, I have no idea how long one of those tapes actually is, but it's LONG. The thing was fluttering away for quite a while, building up a huge pile of loose tape on the floor.

All of this got me thinking - what would happen if you tossed one of these out of a plane at 10,000 feet? Would the air resistance be enough that it'd break before unwinding? Would it unwind all the way before hitting the ground? Does mylar tape show up on radar?

I might be tempted to try it someday if it weren't for the potential to drape over power lines and start a fire or choke wildlife...

Video camera that used audio cassette tape.

[lupinstel]

Anyone remember the childs video camera that would record video in black and white onto audio cassette tape (circa 1985)? I don't remember who made it (may have been Fisher Price), or what it was called, but I had one as a kid, and I wish I could find it now. Anyone remember the name?

Re:CDs will disappear before tape does

[mikael]

Maybe we could have smart CD's where a small magnetic strip is stored on the transparent plastic bit at the centre of the disc. Then you could save some basic information such as the last track position on the disc.