The death of the cassette tape

I am running out of time to write a post. Hence, I decided to post this stuff I read a few months back. Very interesting - reminds me about product life cycle and markets. For readers from the ISB, might be a very good example for a CP during your elective courses.

THE eject button has been pressed on the audio cassette for the very last time.

Currys, the UK’s biggest electronics retailer, yesterday announced it is to stop selling the tapes.

Woolworths and HMV have already removed them from their shelves.

Currys also predicts this Christmas will be the last time it sells hi-fi systems with tape decks included.

Compact cassettes could be frustrating at times — hissing, stretching or getting chewed up in tape decks — but while MP3s and downloads are all the rage now, tapes played an important role in musical culture for more than 40 years.

The recordable tape was introduced to Europe in 1963 by Philips.

Originally designed for dictation, tapes soon became used for home recording and even data storage for computers.

For younger readers, the compact cassette consisted of two miniature spools between which a magnetic tape was passed and wound. This mechanism was housed in a protective plastic shell.

Cassettes took off in the Seventies, offering a recordable alternative to LPs. Pre-recorded cassettes went on sale in Europe in 1965, and from the Seventies to the Nineties became one of the most common formats on which to buy music.

The appeal of the cassette was boosted by the launch of portable music players such as the Sony Walkman in 1979.

A massive 83million tapes were sold in the UK in 1989. Yet by last year the figure had fallen to a mere 100,000.

In the Nineties sales of pre-recorded tapes were overtaken by CDs and record companies started phasing them out.

And in recent years the digital music revolution has pressed pause on the old-fashioned practice of “home dubbing”.

Even Currys managing director Peter Keenan said he will look back with “fondness” at cassettes.

Indeed, the tapes and the players had their good points.

They were more resistent to dust, heat and shocks than most digital media and fixing cassettes didn’t need hi-tech equipment — any tape which spooled out could be wound back in using a Biro.

Their durability saw them act as catalysts for social change, taking rock and punk music behind the Iron Curtain and creating a foothold for Western culture.

But cassettes were not popular with everyone — especially record companies.

In the Eighties the British Phonographic Institute launched an anti-copyright infringement campaign under the slogan “Home Taping Is Killing Music”.

In 1988 the House of Lords ruled in favour of Sir Alan Sugar’s Amstrad that producing a high-speed twin cassette deck did not infringe copyright laws.

Despite the digital music revolution, it is thought around 500million tapes are still in circulation.

And beware, here are other devices we reckon could be on the way out next:

Answering machines; Fax machines; Portable CD players; Watches

You have been warned . . .