(By Lily Rothman, Time Magazine, Aug. 12, 2013)
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 to 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."
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