Rewound By Lily Rothman
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 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.

end of article