Rewind: Sixty Three Years of the Cassette Tape
The humble cassette tape consisted of yards of magnetic-coated brown film, 0.15inch wide, held on two spools and encased in plastic.
This marvellous invention ensured I’ll never forget one particular memory of being a teenager in the 1970s. Every Sunday teatime, ears glued to BBC Radio one, I patiently waited for Tony Blackburn to run down the top forty singles in the UK charts for that particular week.
I sat at the kitchen table, finger hovering over the red record button on the family radio and cassette player, hoping my Phillips C90 cassette tape wouldn’t get stuck in the machine. This would have meant carefully pulling it out and rewinding by sticking the end of a pencil in a spool, praying the tape didn’t get twisted, or worse, stretched and broke.
I accumulated hundreds of tapes and can clearly remember writing each song I’d recorded on the little white inlay card that came with each blank tape, which were housed in a transparent plastic case.
The cassette tape was first introduced over sixty years ago, in August 1963 by Phillips, at the Berlin Radio Show. It was invented by Dutchman, Lou Ottens and went on to become incredibly popular in 1970s and 1980s, especially so when the Sony Walkman became available in the UK in 1980. Its invention allowed people to listen to their favourite music ‘on the go’ and in 1989, sales of tapes in the UK alone were over eighty million. They retained their popularity in the UK until 1992, eventually being taken over by the compact disc.
But cassette tapes are making a comeback, with around 195,000 being bought in 2022. In fact, some artists’ albums sold more copies on cassette than vinyl. In the first quarter of 2025, sales rose by a staggering 204.7% in the United States.
A number of major artists, including Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Lady Gaga, Charli XCX and Royel Otis have all released material on cassette.
I don’t think I will be buying any. I really don’t miss the painstaking task of rewinding all that tape.
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