CASSETTE WEEK - DAY 1
WELCOME TO CASSETTE WEEK 2020!
My name is Charlie Tapes and i’m your “host” for Cassette Week. I‘ve been
running an online cassette tape store/label since 2014 called Tapehead City. I wanted to contribute something to the cassette community and this is what i came up with.
Please note: I’m not a writer or journalist. There will definitely be grammar errors, spelling errors, run-on sentences etc. Some information may even be incorrect. I’m no expert, this is just what I know, or think I know. It’s for fun and nothing else. You’ll probably say to yourself that you could have done a better job and you’re probably right, but this year you’re stuck with me.
-Charlie
“If sharks can have a week, then cassettes should get one too”
So what is Cassette Week? Excellent question, the idea behind Cassette Week is pretty simple…Spend a week celebrating the cassette format with the bands, labels, stores and fans that keep our favorite format alive. Although the COVID-19 outbreak has put some limitations on what is possible, we are going to make the best of it and just have fun.
And to celebrate Cassette Week 2020, we are super excited to present 50 exclusive Cassette Week releases. Check out the list of participating stores and order up some new music! I am sure most of you, just like me, are nostalgia junkies and gravitate towards collecting the music we grew up on. But this week is also about taking chances and diving deep into some new sounds. Remember when you would walk into a music store and check out the new release section ... looking at the album covers, and reading the titles of songs trying to figure out if it’s something you would like. While we can’t give you that same experience we do think new music is good for the soul and new music is something your future self can be nostalgic about : )
This week we will travel between the retro past and the analog future [no DeLorean required] to a time before streaming and downloading music. “if my calculations are correct when this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you’re gonna see some serious shit.”
Before we get started let’s just take a quick look at the week ahead…
Sunday - Welcome to Cassette Week
Monday - Cassette culture at the record store
Tuesday - Tapehead Tuesday / Prison tapes
Wednesday - Epic cassette collections
Thursday - Cassette culture at the record label
Friday - The Art of the Mixtape
Saturday - Release Day!
[Each blog posts will become available on their corresponding days]
So today i thought it would be fun to just go through the history of the cassette with some pictures and videos.
Alright, let’s get this party started. LL. Kick it off!
LL COOL J - “I Cant Live Without my Radio” Live at Soul train 1986
[crowd applause] What a performance!! Thanks LL!
20 years before LL Cool J decided he couldn’t live without his radio or Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) held a boombox outside of Diane Court's (Ione Skye) there was a team of engineers in Belgium working on something that would soon change the culture of our world.
For those of you that don’t know him please let me first introduce {drum roll]… Lou! {applause}
Lou Ottens was a Dutch engineer who worked for Philips and in 1962 he led a team in Belgium that invented the first ever compact cassette tape. It was introduced to Europe at the Berlin radio show in 1963 and then to the United States in 1964. The cassette was originally designed for dictation machines, but as fidelity improved it began to be used for music. All Hail Lou Ottens!
The first ever cassette player was also released by the Philips company in 1968
EL-3300
It was a mono compact cassette recorder made by Philips
Although sound quality of early cassette recordings were poor, Improvements in technology and the introduction of stereo recording, chromium tapes and Dolby noise reduction made hifi quality devices possible. Several European electronics brands introduced similar devices.
The revolution begins…
Throughout the 70’s & 80’s many cassette brands and cassette players began to hit the market including the in-car cassette deck.
By the 80’s cassettes were outselling LP’s and became the most popular music format. The cassette and boombox also had a profound influence on the culture of fashion and movies.
Cassettes also fueled a DIY culture of underground music that gave people the power to record and distribute their own albums without the need for expensive studio time and corporate record labels. This is also how a new music from the Bronx was spreading across the city which we all now know as hiphop.
This new technology also fueled a culture of Bootlegging and Piracy. The Grateful dead actually allowed fans to record their live shows in a “tapers section” as long as they were not sold for profit. Tape trading of “live shows” became a Dead Head subculture.
Bow Wow Wow released the first ever cassette single in 1980 “C30 C60 C90 Go” which included lines like “I don’t buy records in your shop / now i tape them all”
"Home Taping Is Killing Music" was the slogan of a 1980s anti-copyright infringement propaganda campaign by the British Phonographic Industry(BPI), a British music industry trade group. With the rise in cassette recorder popularity, the BPI feared that the ability of private citizens to record music from the radio onto cassettes would cause a decline in record sales.
Not everyone supported the campaign….
The Dead Kennedys
In God We Trust, Inc
1981
In the early 1970’s boomboxes started to be developed in Japan which quickly took over the market. The boombox started to become popular in America in the late 70’s with companies like Panasonic, Sony, General Electric and Marantz producing players.
Let’s send it over to Lyle and Freddy to talk about Boomboxes and the culture that surrounded them. {applause}
The boombox is one of the most important inventions of our time. It shaped a culture that is still relevant today. However not everybody was as excited about the new sound in the air. Let’s check in with Kurt Loder for an MTV news report on a “boombox ban”.
Love em or hate em boomboxes had a tremendous impact on our culture.
There might only be one invention that out shadows the boombox, even though it’s smaller in size. That would obviosly be the Walkman! Not to take away from the Ipod. It’s an amazing invention Steve (RIP), but the portable cassette player was kinda the original ipod. The experience of listening to music would never be the same.
On July 1st 1979 the first walkman went on sale in Japan. It sold for around $150.00.
Sony Walkman TPS-L2
The original Walkman portable cassette player, released July 1, 1979.
Isn’t it just beautiful???
Ok now let’s hit the streets of NYC and see what the people are saying about this new device.
From there many variations were made and it became one of Sonys best selling products of all time. The Sony Walkman sold over 400 million players.
For in depth walkman talk, a great resource site is The Walkman Archive.
Last year Sony celebrated it’s 40 year anniversary of the walkman with a “walkman” that did NOT play cassettes. Instead, the 16GB device played music through Wi-Fi and Android apps. It was quite the “womp womp” disappointment moment we were not hoping for.
Since the Walkman stopped being produced, the portable cassette players being manufactured are made with very cheap parts out of China. Jensen makes an “okay” one.
Now with resurgence in cassettes 2 companies are gearing up for a new portable cassette player release and we are hope quality is priority. The WE ARE REWIND player is expected to be released by November 2020. The “Mystik” by RECORD THE MASTERS was running a Kickstarter that failed in April 2020. We reached out, but did not hear back.
As far as cassette duplication of today there are a bunch of companies such as Duplication.ca and Cryptic Carousel, but the biggest of them all would be National Audio Company. Heres a quick vid with Robert Coverston the chief technician at NAC.
Well… Thats going to do it for today. I hope you’ve enjoyed day #1 of Cassette Week. We will be back tomorrow to talk tapes with with 3 record store owners.
If you’re still itching for more tape talk I highly recommend watching “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape” It’s available to rent on most platforms including Vimeo, Prime, Itunes & Youtube. Check out the trailer below.
CASSETTE WEEK 2020 ALBUM COVER CAROUSEL.
Find more info on all these releases on here
