Phil, very interesting.

-----Original Message-----
From: For blind ham radio operators [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Phil Scovell
Sent: Tuesday, August 13, 2013 4:01 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Happy birthday Cassette Tape

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