The Cassette-Tape Revolution
17th October 2024
The ascent of the cassette caused a major freak-out among record-company executives. Nearly anyone who has ever bought vinyl will be familiar with the cassette-and-crossbones image that was for many years printed on record sleeves, accompanied by the dire warning: “Home taping is killing music.” On both sides of the Atlantic, the recording industry sought, futilely, to make the duplication of music on cassette tapes illegal. Other proposals included a compensatory tax on blank tapes. A member of the National Association of Recording Merchandisers even went so far as to equate cassettes with recreational drug use: “Very soon it becomes a hobby. And after it becomes a hobby, it becomes a habit.” None of those strategies blunted the popularity of the cassette tape. As Masters observes, the “perception that home taping was illegal or at least immoral . . . succeeded in making tapes seem even cooler and more rebellious.”
The cassette rubbed everybody’s nose in the fact that THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, merely a government-enforced artificial monopoly that is increasingly more impossible to enforce.