Cassette tapes? What are they?
29th May 2009
Firstly, April Fools Day was nearly two months ago so this is not a joke. Secondly, it has been widely reported so it must be true! The sales of the humble cassette tape are on the rise, with 1 million blank tapes being sold in the first four months of this year by the market leader, TDK.
While reading about this I started to ask the question many people would ask – why? The Police Force continue to use tape recordings for interviews of suspects and victims because the legal system “do not trust” digital technologies, many believe that digital recordings can be tampered with and produced fraudulently. This obviously adds to sales, but this cannot be the only reason the tape is on the increase surely?
I bought my car just under five years ago, and I was surprised to see the VW Polo (my other choice if I hadn’t gone for my 206) still had a cassette player as standard. It was actually one of the reasons I didn’t choose the Polo as I did not have any tapes left – as all my music was now on CDs. It would have cost me a lot to have one built in, as my last Kenwood CD player (my pride and joy) had been stolen by car thieves not long before.
The industry believes that many people, especially during the credit crunch, cannot afford to upgrade their car music system and therefore use a tape player – which obviously means they need to record their favourite tunes onto the all important blank tape. Now that the likes of HMV are no longer selling tapes of any kind, people seek out the specialist companies to order from instead, meaning the economic downturn is proving not so bad for TDK and others.
Illegal downloading is on the increase even though iTunes and Spotify are seeing their downloads soar, but the humble cassette tape – even after a sharp decrease of 50 million sales per year in 2007 – is back in the game. It may only be being used for musical accompaniment in the car, or a way of securing an arrest or conviction in court, (and for mobile music people use the iPod, MP3 or MP4 player these days), but the tape is still around and is as reliable as ever. Would I use them again myself? Probably not, but it is always assuring to know that we have options!
Mobile music is the trend nowadays, it makes sense to have great music on your mobile phone.,’:
mobile music is great, i love to listen to mp3 while on the move.;-*
me and my sister both have mp4 players that are always on our pockets.:`*
i am looking for a really inexpensive mp4 player, which one do you suggest?`~”
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