We moved on from Records to something called 8-track and then cassettes. 8-track never caught on. I had a few, well, my parents had a few growing up and our stereo played them along with records, radio, and cassettes.
8-track tapes
These were a different type of music as it was meant to be portable, you could take your music places. My mom had an 8-track player in one her cars. I think it was the Ford Thunder Bird. Here is what the 8-track tapes looked like.
However, this just never caught on and it went away as the cassette tape took over.
As the music era grew the gadgets to play them grew as well.
Compact Cassette
The United States saw these cassette tapes in 1964 two years after Europe saw these audio storage devices. Yes, audio storage devices that is what these were invented for. Before the 1970s came around the cassette business was estimated at 150 million dollars. Yes, 150 million.
Sound quality
8 Track sound quality was so much better than these new cassettes. The sound on these things was so mediocre it was sad. But in somewhere in the early 1970s, not sure when it caught and past the quality of the 8 track. Not hard since 8 track was trending down.
Cassette tape
You could play these anywhere you could think of. You could play these in your car, thanks to the cassette players. You could play these in the park, thanks to boom boxes, the portable radio players and of course the Walkman, the personal portable music player. My ultimate gadget, well at that time. Here is what the tapes looked like.
Record
You could take a blank tape and record music on to it. You could record music from the radio or from another cassette. Making it possible to do your favorite music hits. You could record some love songs to give to that someone special in your life. These nick Mo tapes was a big hit at least I think. I know I made several but never gave them to anyone. I was too scared as I was worried what they would think.
Decline
The cassettes dropped in sales from 442 million in 1990 to 274,000 in 2007. Compact discs, MP3 and other forms of music took over.
Cassettes were a great gadget. I made great use of them over the years.
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