Like the recent report of Floppy disks finally being dropped by PC World, the electronics retailer Currys has announced that they will no longer be stocking any more cassette tapes. However, they will continue selling blank cassettes in until their current stocks of cassette tapes have dried up.
Philips launched the cassette tape format back in 1963 at which time reel to reel recordings were common. Due to the compact size of the cassette along with the launch of the Sony Walkman, the sales of pre-recorded cassette tapes quickly grew in the 1970s and 1980s, reaching a peak of 83 million tape sales in the UK in 1989. As blank cassette tapes were the main format for dictation and copying music from vinyl records and CDs, blank cassette tapes in the UK reached its peak in 1990 at 95 million sales. However, with the growing popularity of CDs, CD sales overtook pre-recorded CDs in 1993.
With the huge growth of music downloading, CD writers and MP3 players in recent years, blank tape sales and players quickly fell to the point where manufactures are expected to stop making cassette tape players and recorders over the next 18 months. At present, Currys expects to sell fewer than 1 million tapes this year.
Even though the music industry finds unauthorised music downloads as a major threat, before the time of music downloads, consumers would have freely obtained music by rerecording tapes, vinyl records and CDs from friends. Getting the latest tunes could be obtained by simply recording music off the radio. While the quality was inferior to most music distributed online today, most took it for granted back then.
Finally, while the music industry has the ability to sue those sharing and downloading music, from what I can see, the days of cassettes would have been worse, since it is virtually impossible for them to track those copying cassettes from their neighbours, never mind those who taped off the radio! In the end, despite the music industry’s past claim that home taping is killing music, music sales continued to climb all the way up to the peak of cassette tape sales.
For those interested in reading about the history of cassette tapes, have a look at this Wikipedia article on the Compact Cassette
