End of Tape

END OF TAPE

Last month’s announcement by the High Street electrical goods chain Currys that it is to stop selling compact cassette tapes seems to be the beginning of the end for this much loved audio format. More significantly, given that there are an estimated 500 million audiocassettes in cupboards and drawers up and down the country, Currys will no longer stock hi-fi systems that can play tapes.

 it’s a bad business, I think, that one chain store should be allowed to determine whether a particular recording format should live or die. I certainly hope that the humble compact cassette will be around for a few years yet.

  The Dutch company Philips introduced the compact cassette in 1963. The company’s decision to license the format free-of-charge to all comers allowed it to become the standard, portable alternative to vinyl records for most people – with the added advantage that a tape could be used all over again if the user got bored with it.

  Prior to its introduction, the only way for home users to record music was through very fiddly – and very large – reel-to-reel tape recorders.  I bought one of these monsters once in a little second-hand shop in Bridgend, South Wales. I just about managed to get it to fit into a suitcase. The arrival of the compact cassette changed all that.

  The popularity of recordable cassettes greatly concerned the music industry. In 1988 CBS Records sued Amstrad for producing equipment that made copying cassettes easier, a high-speed double cassette deck. CBS lost as the House of Lords ruled that the production and sale of such equipment was not an infringement of copyright as manufacturers and retailers cannot be held responsible for the use put to their equipment by its buyers.

  At this time, LPs and commercially recorded audiocassettes often carried a logo on the packaging whingeing that ‘home taping is killing music and its illegal’. In an argument that prefigured today’s claims over downloading the industry’s pressure group, the BPI tried to stamp out the practice., even arguing for a swingeing tax surcharge on blank tapes. They never got their way.

  As it turned out, home taping never did ‘kill music’. Home taping allowed people to make up their own compilation tapes, either for their own pleasure while out driving in the car or often it was put together to impress a loved one. Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity immortalised this common process in the public imagination. People used to test their skills on the pause button in order to cut out the DJ’s inane prattling over the end of songs, especially on the Top Twenty shows on Sunday evenings.  Few radio presenters were as considerate as the late great John Peel. He deliberately played songs through to the end to allow home taping by his legions of devoted fans.

  The emergence in 1979 of Sony’s Walkman personal stereo  and its many imitators gave new life to the format. In the 1980’s cassettes outsold vinyl records.  Runners and dog walkers could take their music with them.  Ghetto-blasters and boomboxes allowed lovers of loud ‘in-your-face’ music to share their musical tastes with the rest of the neighbourhood – often whether they wanted to hear it or not!

  Sadly, the era of prerecorded music cassettes has had its day. From a peak of  83 million sales in 1989, the BPI say that under 100,000 were sold last year. However, the cassette lives on in audiobook format.