[Dixielandjazz] Goodbye cassette tapes

[Bill Haesler]

Dear friends,
I sent the following earlier today.
However, after I hit 'send' (too late to cancel) it started adding a whole
lot of extra bits!
As a result, the email is probably in the 'sin bin', along with me for
breaking one of our golden rules - no attachments.
Here it is again.
Regards,
Bill. 
___________________________________________________________

Dear friends,
This one of interest via the Australian Dance Band list.
Kind regards,
Bill. 

BBC NEWS | Technology | Not long left for cassette tapes
Friday, 17 June, 2005.

Not long left for cassette tapes.
  The cassette is facing erasure.
  Some 40 years after global cassette production began in earnest, sales are
in terminal decline.
  From its creation in the 1960s through to its peak of popularity in the
1980s, the cassette has been a part of music culture for 40 years.
  But industry experts believe it does not have long left, at least in the
West.
  The cassette may have hissed, been prone to wow and flutter, and often
ended its life chewed in a tape deck, but it ruled for four decades before
MP3s and downloads.
  However, the cassette's reign now seems to be over.
  "Cassette albums have declined quite significantly since their peak in
1989 when they were selling 83 million units in the UK," Matt Phillips of
the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) told BBC World Service's
The Music Biz programme.
  "Last year we saw that there were about 900,000 units sold. It's clear to
see that cassette sales are dwindling fast."

Mix tape.
  Dutch electronics giant Philips perfected the design of the cassette in
the 1960s.
  It was designed to be a new form of portable entertainment, launched into
a market dominated by vinyl LPs and reel-to-reel tape recorders.
  Oddly, Philips did not charge royalties on their cassette patent, allowing
numerous other companies to use their design for free. This ensured the
quick acceptance of it as a new form of media.

Hornby's High Fidelity highlighted the dilemmas of a mix tape.
  It went on to accrue enormous worldwide sales. At its mid-80s peak, it
sold 900 million units a year, 54% of total global music sales.
  The music industry itself, however, remained concerned about cassettes, in
particular the ability of people to record music on them.
  They feared piracy, arguing that home taping was "killing music", a
similar argument to the one occurring today over downloading.
  One thing home taping allowed was the creation of the mix tape - a
compilation of songs often put together as a present for a loved one. The
process of creating the mix tape was immortalised by Nick Hornby in his
novel High Fidelity.
  New York music writer Joel Keller laments that personal computers have
killed the mix tape star, and that the "drag and burn" method of creating
compilation CDs is simply "less fun."
  "I liked it when I sat in front of my stereo, my tape deck, with a big
pile of CDs, deciding on the fly which songs to put in what order," he said.
  "My play and record fingers got a little sore because I had to time it
right. Listening to the song as it played, finding the levels - it seemed
like more of a labour of love than it is it do CDs now."

Legacy.
  However, while cassettes are disappearing quickly from the music stores,
they are clinging on in the UK in bookshops.
  Having begun as a way of providing titles to the blind, a third of all
audio books are still sold on cassette. An audio recording of a bestseller
such as The Da Vinci code can sell between 60-70,000 copies in the UK alone.

Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code has been a success on cassette.
  "Audio tapes are like an old friend that doesn't go away," Pandora White
of Orion audio books told The Music Biz.
  "I think it's the accessibility of it. Where you stop and start is
immediately where you left off, whereas CD can be a bit more tricky."
  And outside of the music stores of the West, cassettes do continue to
survive as a music format, in countries such as Afghanistan and India.
  In some markets, performers record directly onto cassette.
  Keith Joplin, a Director of Research at the International Federation of
Phonographic Industries, said that Turkey still sells 88 million cassettes a
year, India 80 million, and that cassettes account for 50% of sales in these
countries. In Saudi Arabia, it is 70%.
  However, he added that this is because the penetration of CD players "is
not 100% in those markets."
  With the US's largest magnetic tape factory ceasing production earlier
this year, there are fears that even if cassettes are wanted in future,
there will no longer be anything to wrap around the spools.
  However, terms such as fast forward, rewind, record and pause, everyday
words bequeathed to us from the tape era, ensure that in the English
language at least, the legacy of the cassette will survive.