The Cassette Lives On

The cassette tape. The small, plastic and familiar step in the progress of portable music. Sure, it's obsolete, but that doesn't mean it can't be remembered and appreciated! Every true music afficionado with the slightest drop of geek blood in their veins will appreciate the beauty of a tie made out of cassette tape, or the neat and geeky statement of a pair of cassette cufflinks!

Yes, it was bulky, it didn't hold an awful lot of music and it wore out eventually, but most people today had and loved a portable tape player, recorded songs off the radio or CD player to create lovingly compiled mix tapes, carefully labeled each one - and then took pot luck on the faded and illegible labels of mix tapes from five years before. You can still pick them up very cheaply at the odd garage sale, and one tends to find boxes of them in the attic or buried under the CDs. And occasionally, you'll find a song or two that isn't available on CD or digitially yet. They will never be the collector's item for the music lover that LPs are if only because they just aren't that durable, but they were easy to use, easy to record onto and over, and much less fragile. Cassettes were the first true option for portable music. Love them for that.