Blog Post #4 Cassette Tapes

                                                                        Cassette Tapes      

    Cassette tapes were created in 1962 by Lou Ottens in the Philips company in Belgium. Lou was a Dutchman who came up with the idea of cassette tapes while experimenting with reel-to-reel tape recorder. He wanted something more user-friendly since reel-to-reel technology was heavier and mostly used by trained professionals. Cassette tapes were built to be compact and used magnetic tape to record. Furthermore this tape allowed the user to record and separate tracks of audio to create their own playlist. This played a major role in the creation of mix-tapes in the causing cassettes to greatly increase in popularity throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Cassette Tapes eventually becoming apart of the global market through the implementation of better sound quality and more size variety. These massive improvements that came from the cassette lead to its sales surpassing the 8 track ,another magnetic music device released around the same time. This was due to cassette tapes being introduced to cars through cassette decks in the mid 1970s furthermore this let users save where they left off on a song. The 8 track was at first considered a competitor with the cassette however after the improvements in audio for the cassette the 8 tack saw a market decline in the 1980s. During the 1980s the primary competitor of cassettes was vinyls which was leading at the at the top of U.S music sales. Cassette tapes eventually surpassed vinyls in 1984 reaching a revenue total of 6-7 billion from 1985 to 1990. This massive influx of consumers caused Cassette Tapes to be used in more than just music. One of the most well known examples of this can been by their presence in the Iranian Revolution where they were given to rebels in order to record sermons. Cassettes provided the user with the ability to political messages and their religious views which caused countries like India to dislike their influence on Hindu affairs.

In 1995 CDs became the dominant media bringing in a revenue of 16 billion. CDs were seen as more effective than cassettes because they allowed the user to do everything that was done with the cassette but on a wider scale since you could now use them to pull songs from your PC. After the release of CDs cassettes faced a gradual decline and were only rarely being brought for cars before eventually falling off the market.

When the cassette tapes were first released some negatives included poor sound quality and being more likely to be stolen. Cassette tapes like the other technology of this era were on a time limit in which they could go bad. This is due to how their magnetic tape is structured. Since both tapes are stuck together with glue like substance it makes sense that overtime it will lose its cohesiveness. The opposite can also be said if the cassette tape is not used because glue around the magnetic tapes will become to compact. Even if kept in perfect condition cassette tapes will only last 30 years before deteriorating.