Blog post #4 | The Cassette Tape

The music industry became what it is today due to the invention of the cassette tape. A cassette tape is an audio recording in a rectangular container composed of lightweight materials, making it ideal to carry around and record things. It can do this through a magnetic tape. The magnetic tape was also designed as an advancement where you could replay audio. 

To record audio for a cassette, someone would place it in a recorder and immediately prepares itself to be recorded. When they were done recording, their voice would have been converted into electrical waves and imprinted onto the magnetic tape. People could play this audio back and the recorder would take the electrical waves and convert them back into sound waves through the use of magnetic power. 

Lou Ottens invented the cassette tape as a more affordable, portable way of listening to music. Before Ottens, there were larger versions of the magnetic tape that were incredibly clunky and inconvenient for everyday use. He took on the challenge of shrinking tapes when he became head of product development for Philips Technology in Belgium.

Something that I believe is cool about history, especially when it comes to technology, as tech advances it becomes more available to the people. Look at Electric Vehicles for example, when they first hit the market, like the Tesla Roadster in 2012, they were priced so only high-income citizens could buy them. As time passed, more companies would innovate and offer that technology to the human population, which people would buy because it was no longer an exclusive product. 

Before Ottens, if someone wanted to record something they would have needed a recorder from Ampex. During World War Two, the Germans invented a recorder using magnetic reel tapes. The Americans found out about these recorders and started sending parts home until someone figured out how to replicate them and make them better. This recorder would drive Ottens to innovate the cassette tape.

Ottens's motivation derived from how he wanted a high-quality reel-to-reel tape without clunkiness or expansiveness. He had competition though. Phillips Technology had two teams working on the cassette. One team, the Vienna team, would manufacture the single-hole cassette. Ottens's team, the Berlin team, manufactured the two-hole cassette, which drew inspiration from a previous failed product. Phillips Tech picked the cassette tape they would mass manufacture. With the help of Sony, Phillips was able to surpass their competitors and establish the cassette worldwide. Sony basically forced Phillips to license the format of the cassette tape for free. 

Ottens's dream was realized and the audio-listening industry was revolutionized because music on the go became a reality. This is comedic considering how Ottens did not design it for the music industry, but just for recording things people had said. The cassette tape inspired companies to innovate and create products like the Sony Walkman & the Boombox. I believe that the cassette tape prompted these inventions, and these inventions walked so that wireless headphones and Bluetooth speakers could run. 

The Sony Walkman was pivotal in that sense because it overtook vinyl records. The records were still preferred for home use, but the Walkman sold better because it could be used in more situations despite how it was more expensive. Another pro to the cassette tapes would be that they could play up to three hours of music or radio.

The cassette tape was also revolutionary because it made recording things simple & easy, yet it carried emotional weight through how it could carry a familiar face's voice. In 1967, Phillips Technology invented the Typ EL 3302, a recorder allowing anyone to record audio onto blank cassette tapes. This created an emotional appeal because anyone's voice could be recorded, which would have been extremely difficult to do prior unless you had the money for it.

The cassette tape would be overtaken by the CD player. CD players had the same benefits as cassette tapes by being portable. It was a slow process to get music & audio tracks onto CD players, but it was possible through tech like the CD-R & CD-RW via mp3 files. A downside to the cassette tape would be that you could not just download an mp3 file like you could with a CD disk. Someone could also buy CDs in mass whereas cassette tapes would be more expensive and not as space efficient.