KS sends along this NYT obit for cassette tapes.

“While the cassette was dumped long ago by the music industry, it has lived on among publishers of audio books. Many people prefer cassettes because they make it easy to pick up in the same place where the listener left off, or to rewind in case a certain sentence is missed. For Hachette, however, demand had slowed so much that it released its last book on cassette in June, with “Sail,” a novel by James Patterson and Howard Roughan.

“The funeral at Hachette — an office party in the audio-book department — mirrored the broader demise of cassettes, which gave vinyl a run for its money before being eclipsed by the compact disc.”

For those of you too young to remember the cassette was going to kill the music industry because it enabled rampant piracy. Why, you could take any song off any album, record it on a cassette, and then just give it to a friend. With people giving away music, why buy it? Of course, because so many friends were introducing each other to music that wasn’t played on the radio the recording industry entered a period of un-paralleled profit.

They could be doing the same today if they chose to embrace digital distribution of music, but instead have chosen lawsuits against music fans as their preferred business model.

One of the great anthems promoting cassette piracy was a song by Bow Wow Wow called “C30 C60 C90 Go!” Still one of my favorite songs today.

Mark Malazarte at Calavera Comics posted some great posters a few months ago using this song as a theme.

Mark recounts this anecdote which I’d never heard.

“Promo poster for a mixtape project I am trying to organize. Inspired by the ultimate mixtape anthem “C30 C60 C90 Go!” by Bow Wow Wow. Rumor has it Malcolm Mclaren had the b-side of the cassette single of the song left blank, encouraging people to tape over it and make their own mixtape. However, their label wasn’t too happy about that so they pulled the single off the shelves.”

“Calavera Comics is located deep in the bowels of Tampa, FL.”

(Thanks, KS!)

Random Articles