Let's take a moment and say goodbye to the Cassette tape, let's think back to the times when car CD players were rare and your local Sam Goody carried your favorite album in Tape, LP and CD formats. Let's think back to the time when double tape decks were great to have, because of all the mix tapes you could make for girls, road trips or to get psyched up for "the big game". Yes as a format the tape basically died years ago, but now that book publishers are abandoning the format tapes have gone from being on life support to being completely dead.
Image courtesy of the NY Times
It continually amazes me how fast technology has changed over the past 15 years or so, an how in some cases where you have people of different ages who don't have much of a generation gap culturally they will have a generation gap with respect to technology. To people my age (32) the immediate reference for a mix tape is music compilation on a cassette tape even though we'd now receive such an item on CD/iPod/Playlist, etc,
to someone in their early to mix 20s mix tape is just a compilation of content that could be in any number of formats. E.g. even though you’re familiar with similar music, movies, TV shows, pop culture, etc, your technology experiences are different.
I have to say that while I do enjoy the ease, convenience and sound quality (if you use uncompressed formats anyway) of quickly preparing a mix CD on my PC, it's not as enjoyable as preparing a mix tape was
"back in the day" . As Nick Hornby wrote in the book "High Fidelity" there are rules to preparing a mix tape, it's veritable art form:
"To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do".
Playlists and digital music may make the process easier, but it's nowhere near as fun and the veritable art form has been lost I'm afraid. I just don't treasure the mix CDs (or playlists) I make today as much as I do the mix tapes I still hang on to, even though I lack the equipment to play them. I think there is something about the fact that you can't easily duplicate the process that makes the mix tape seem more valuable.
Several years ago I was "recruited" to help my Mother move, and while cleaning out her garage I found several shoeboxes with old medals from my track and field days and something else I hadn't dealt with in years: Cassette tapes. A couple of prerecorded tapes (E.g.
Bell Biv Devoe , from the days when Bugle Boys jeans were popular, not to mention such ghastly recordings as Poison's "Open up and say ah"), mix tapes and just tapes my siblings and I had recorded of ourselves singing, acting out movies, etc. I wanted to play the tapes for nostalgia's sake but wasn't able to due to not having a tape player, so the tapes continue to sit in a closet, gathering dust and waiting for the time that I finally get around to buying a tape deck.
It will be interesting to see how/if tapes live on for nostalgia reasons, if people will continue to buy tape decks to play those mix tapes people created for them, the tapes they created for that big road trip, sporting event, etc. If eBay is any indication this may well already be true because prices for used tape decks can easily exceed those for new DVD Players, despite the fact that it's still rather easy to buy brand new tape decks for similar prices.
You can read the NY Times article discussing the above graphic comes from
here , the image is actually from a "funeral" held for the cassette tape by a book publisher that is dropping the format.
