‘It was a solution to share your musical experiences’: why cassette tapes flourished, and nonetheless endure

Everyone who grew up with a tape deck remembers mixtapes, or compilation tapes, as we used to name them within the UK. They bear in mind sitting with a pile of records or CDs, assembling the proper order, sending the fitting message. The narrator of Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, Rob Fleming, had a set of parameters that needed to be noticed: “You can’t have two tracks by the identical artist facet by facet, until you’ve achieved the entire thing in pairs, and … oh, there are a great deal of guidelines.”

“My first girlfriend and I had a cassette,” remembers Britt Daniel, frontman of Spoon. “She’d put a music on it, then give it to me. I’d preserve maintain of it for a few days, then put a music on and provides it again to her. They had been all message songs – my communication expertise weren’t top-notch, however it was very candy.”

“I used to attempt to impress with a very extensive number of genres,” says Adrian Quesada of Black Pumas. “I knew a little bit bit about jazz, so I’d at all times put some jazz on. There was at all times a ballad or two. And there was at all times some hip-hop that I believed the ladies would love – A Tribe Called Quest.”

Mine had been a succession of tapes of mid-80s indie and outdated psychedelia. I’d sneak into the workplace at Boots in Slough, the place I labored within the holidays, photocopy fragments of guide covers and postcards to make a collage cowl to wrap across the J-card insert, with the title on the backbone – every one was numbered entry in a sequence known as Never Say No to Perfect Popcorn – after which ship to whichever beneficiary I felt most deserving.

Mixtapes, although, had been only one manner the cassette had a seismic impression on the music business, as explored in two new books – Unspooled by Rob Drew and High Bias by Marc Masters. The format instilled concern of piracy within the music business, but did greater than any prior invention to unfold music around the globe.

In the growing world, the place main labels operated near-monopolies, they had been a method to place music into circulation that held no industrial curiosity to the large corporations, spurring the popularity of genres within the course of (the Syrian singer Omar Souleyman started as one of many marriage ceremony singers whose units had been bought on cassette at stalls, earlier than he was heard by western tape collectors and received a global viewers). Cassettes spurred the unfold of hip-hop and thrash metallic, created a micro-economy for go-go in Washington DC, and so they turned (and in lots of instances stay) the popular medium for lo-fi and experimental music.

“Cassettes have a bunch of various roles,” Masters says on a video name, sitting in entrance of a shelving unit of, sure, tapes. “The most necessary one is the liberty they afforded each listeners and artists to create their very own musical experiences, and be capable of share and cross round these experiences. It was a solution to hearken to music that was within the listener’s management quite than dictated to them. But most likely much more necessary is the truth that musicians may use them to get their music round with out having to get it accepted by labels or pay for costly studio time.”

You may additionally see them not simply as a solution to hear music, however as instruments within the struggle in opposition to repression. “There had been political ramifications to the unfold of the cassette within the Seventies and Eighties in some nations,” Drew says, “particularly authoritarian regimes such because the USSR and Poland. Suddenly there was not simply music however propaganda being unfold round by cassette.”

Cassettes didn’t exist with out {hardware}, although. It turned the popular format of hip-hop after the invention of the growth field and the automotive stereo (Masters’ guide goes into element concerning the New York automotive companies that bought themselves on the idea of getting the most recent mixtapes, with unique shout-outs for the drivers from the featured MCs). The Walkman made transportable, particular person music a chance and have become an amazing car for the mixtape. And the Tascam Portastudio – an inexpensive recorder that allowed musicians to combine down 4 tracks to cassette – opened up house recording (Bruce Springsteen launched his Portastudio demos because the Nebraska album, after deciding full studio variations of the identical songs with the E Street Band couldn’t seize the temper he desired).

The format’s unfold was additionally depending on an act of each generosity and industrial pragmatism by its maker. The first “compact cassette” was developed by Lou Ottens of the Dutch electronics big Philips and launched in 1963 (it was marketed as an assist for recording speech, not music). Its nice asset was not sound high quality, however portability and ease of use, in contrast with the reel-to-reel tapes that had come earlier than. To be sure its invention would dominate the market, Philips licensed it to different corporations.

Given it invented each the cassette and the CD, does Philips have a declare to being an important firm within the historical past of recorded music? “There is a giant argument to be made for that,” Masters says. “It’s additionally weirdly ironic that they might be taken with growing a format [CD] that they should have identified had an opportunity to knock off the cassette. But there’s one thing admirable about that. So many corporations entrench themselves within the one factor that they developed and don’t see that the longer term would possibly come and knock them off – like Blockbuster, holding on to renting videotapes for ever.”

For a number of years now, there have been claims of the return of the cassette. Those claims, to be frank, are overplayed. Though gross sales within the UK have been rising for the final 10 years, they nonetheless solely amounted to 195,000 in complete in 2022, in accordance with the BPI. In the US, gross sales rose by 28% to 440,000, out of 79.89m bodily album gross sales. The bulk of these gross sales are major-label releases, which causes Masters a little bit irritation. “The predominant level of placing out pre-recorded cassettes proper now could be that they’re low cost,” he says. “Major labels don’t should care in the event that they’re low cost, and so they promote them for far more than they need to.”

On the opposite hand, although, he notes that the majors’ curiosity helps preserve cassette manufacturing going, then that in turns helps the labels and artists within the underground for whom cassettes are nonetheless their lifeblood. “I’m prepared to dwell with a little bit hipsterism if it helps the extra significant a part of the state of affairs.”

One of the folks on the significant finish is Fernando Aguilar, co-founder of the California pop-punk cassette label Stay Tough, which sprang out of the hardcore/energy violence/grindcore label he ran. “For the hardcore scene, the music is of course lo-fi. So there’s no distinction between dubbing it on a cassette or doing it on CD or vinyl. But for emo and pop-punk, it’s extra of the nostalgia issue. I’m working with loads of screamo bands, and all they need to do is cassettes. I feel the heat of it enhances the lo-fi facet of it.”

For a label similar to Stay Tough, engaged on cassette can be a matter of economics. The ordinary run is about 50 copies, and breaking even is “punk gold, proper there”. That’s so much simpler when your predominant outlay is clean tapes, quite than urgent vinyl. At the second, Aguilar says, he’s paying about $1.16 (92p) per clean tape, and 50 cents for a case. Vinyl, in contrast, is prone to have a minimal run of 100 items and to price rather more. The Musicol Recording Studio in Columbus, Ohio, for instance, quotes $1,345 (£1,079) for 100 12in records in plain white paper sleeves. And with cassettes, Aguilar doesn’t have to hitch the lengthy queue for vinyl urgent crops (at present six months at Musicol) – he can go from getting the recording from the band to having a cassette able to promote in a fortnight, then promote them for between $4 (£3.20) and $8 (£6.40) apiece.

Even the underground is affected by the mainstream, although. Aguilar observed an uptick of curiosity in cassettes after the Marvel film Guardians of the Galaxy, by which the character Peter Quill always performed an historical mixtape. That similar yr, 2014, a mixtape additionally featured within the TV sequence Over the Garden Wall. “When that and Guardians of the Galaxy occurred much more folks began popping up with tapes.”

Stay Tough additionally has a Bandcamp web page for downloads. So does Aguilar assume folks actually hearken to his bands on cassette? He laughs. “Mainly, no. You purchase them to assist the musicians, and for the album cowl. And additionally as a result of it appears cool. Whether youthful children truly play them is up for debate; I personally don’t assume so.”

But nonetheless the cassette survives. It might not have the romance of vinyl. It actually doesn’t have the constancy of the CD. But so long as there may be an underground, and so long as folks cherish the bodily – and might’t afford to press vinyl or need to have the ability to do the whole lot from recording to distributing themselves – it can proceed to outlive. Home taping didn’t kill music; it helped it dwell.