“The cassette tape was introduced to the music-buying public 50 years ago last week,” writes Dan Brown on Tuesday (9/17) at the London Free Press (London, Ontario). “With one possible exception—its technological cousin, the eight track—it has gone down in history as the most inconvenient and unreliable music format ever offered. Yet without cassettes, we wouldn’t have the music industry as we know it today.… Tapes gave us three very important concepts: that albums should be cheap (if not free), songs should be arranged in an order pleasing to the individual listener, and the entire experience of listening to your music should be portable. These are the bedrock ideas upon which modern music culture, with its downloads and iPods, is founded. Born in the 1960s, I grew up with tapes in the 1970s and 1980s. They were considered the inferior alternative to vinyl…. The advantage was that, among your group of friends, only one person needed to buy any given album. All you had to do was find a blank tape, which could be had for a couple bucks.… Seen in retrospect, tapes were a bridge of sorts—between the rigid ordering of albums and the playlists of the modern era.”
Posted September 19, 2013
