EOTO: Cassette Tapes

 

Developed in 1962 by Lou Ottens under the Dutch company Philips the compact cassette or cassette Tape revolutionized audio recording, music and the spread of media in many ways. The device was originally designed for dictation machines allowed for the recording of audio as well as playable audio more than once. However over time and with more development the technology began to be used for playing music back. The technology did a lot of good for the music and audio world some of it however wasn't all good there were downsides to having easy access to music. Needless to say the cassette tape dramatically changed the world of media.

Pros

There are a lot of pros to the cassette tape, the technology was easy to access due to its small "compact" size which meant it could go virtually anywhere. The small compact device was only a measly 4 by 2.5 inches. Prior to this we had Vinyl records which were large and fragile which made it hard to move around let alone listen to music with considering you had to have a record player to use the thing. 

The next pro cassette tapes had were that due to the way they were made you had 2 sides that could record 2 different audios. This allowed for multiple audios to be recorded and distributed. On top of that each side could play about 30 to 60 minutes of audio depending on the type of cassette tape. That's between 60 and 120 total minutes of play time.

Another pro was cassette tapes eventually become so popular and wide-spread that many vehicles had built in cassette players 

These are just a few of the pros that cassette tapes provide, however it would be ignorant to thing that this wonderful technology didn't have a negative impact on the world in a small way.

Cons

As I said above it would be ignorant to believe that cassette tapes didn't have some negative impact on the world. Besides the massive amount of resources it took to mass produce these small devices the biggest con was the rise of pirating media culture. Due to the portability and the easy access to cassette tapes and audio recording devices it was very easy to copy audio from one cassette tape onto another. This gave rise to pirating culture where people would illegal copy audio most commonly music and put it onto another cassette tape. While there aren't many cons to the cassette tape I feel that fact that the cassette tape practically started the media pirating business its pretty big and should be looked at.

Besides the impact the cassette tapes had on the world and how it dramatically changed how we produce and even see music the device only lasted 25 years and it was replaced by a titan in the media world that is only now just being replaced and that would be the CD. 

The cassette tape dramatically altered how we see music and it is my belief that the cassette tape began the modernization of music that we know today.