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Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

244 points by rcarmo 3y ago

andrewstuart 3y ago
I have some nostalgia for most technologies. Tapes and printers, not so much.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  Tape is still amazing in terms of data density and storage longevity
  - ggm 3y ago
    I could probably fit my entire MP3 collection as FLAC on a single DLT. Shame abou the seek times but some kind of lower bitrate forward coding across the entire dataset, a cache and seek times might not matter as much for long plays. It would be very silly to repurpose a DLT tape library for an audio jukebox: one which carried "lethal to enter if not disarmed" stickers and a ruinous electricity bill.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      At a half decent compression rate it probably fits on a large micro SD card as well, unless you have thousands of records.
    - meindnoch 3y ago
      Why would you store MP3 as FLAC?
      - ggm 3y ago
        I would re-encode from the original or get flac. What I have digitally is compressed because of history, more than anything else. It was a figure of speech. The point is a single DLT is huge. Well .. LTO.
        Filligree 3y ago
        It’s just a pity they’re so expensive. By rights I should be using tape for my backups, but even a single tape drive is…
        ggm 3y ago
        For anyone who wonders a single LTO9 tape is about $250 and holds 45TB. I'm holding about 15 to 20 years data hoarding at home on 6TB zfs. So for me, cold storage for life would be at this price point. As you say the drive is heinous too: $10k+
  - anonymous_sorry 3y ago
    Not analogue audio cassettes though. They would get tangled in the tape deck, and be ruined. They would sightly unspool themselves, get caught on something or twisted, and be ruined. They would stretch with overuse, distorting the audio horribly and/or comically, and be ruined. In my youth it seemed like every major roadside was littered with discarded audio tape. Clumps of tangled brown film dolefully flapping about in the breeze. This is not a format to be overly nostalgic for.
- coldtea 3y ago
  Tapes where great - if you mean audio tapes. Printers are crap even today.
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    Yeah, thankfully we don't need them that often anymore. That said, is there a convenient, compact printer for documents (greyscale is fine) for the just in case times? I think I've seen a compact bar shaped laser printer aimed at laptops, but I'm afraid of the toner cartridges being overpriced or hard to find.
    - soco 3y ago
      It will probably still run with the same Windows driver written in late 90's in Win16 then patched and glued and slightly tilted to kinda work even today, kinda. Because here's where the real adventure happens, between buggy drivers and prehistoric spoolers.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    Audio tapes were crap for most people. There was good tape certainly -- reel to reel, metal tapes, etc. But most people used the cheap normal tape, and probably C120 which had a tendency to get tangled in the mechanism. Modern dirt cheap 44.1 KHz/16 bit audio is far superior to anything you could get in the tape era, except maybe a reel to reel tape set to the high quality speed. And even the best tape still had some wow and flutter because it's ultimately a mechanical device with imperfect speed control.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      We did - briefly - have the DAT (digital audio tape) format.
      - flyinghamster 3y ago
        That got kneecapped by the recording industry [0], and the result was that consumer interest was near zero. Once recordable CDs and then MP3 and friends came on the scene, it was rendered irrelevant. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Copy_Management_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Copy_Management_System
- Sosh101 3y ago
  Tapes gave us the mix-tape - a beautiful thing for sharing.
thriftwy 3y ago
What's interesting, 1980s was the heyday of Russian Rock tape albums. Soviet government did actually go after artists for doing live concerts (on the grounds of illegal enterpreneurship†), but not after tape recording stuff. You could duplicate as many tape albums as you wished in specialized tape copying booths, as well as at home if you had the hardware. † You are probably wondering whether there was "legal" enterpreneurship option in the late USSR. Basically, nope, not before Perestroika kicked in.
- citrin_ru 3y ago
  Even before cassette tapes become available people in USSR recorded and copied music at home using reel-to-reel tapes. LP vinyl record was the most produced media back then but it was state controlled - even is some music was not outright censored it was not published in large enough numbers if state official though massed should not listen a particular music genre or a record. I wonder of people outside soviet block copied musing at home using reel-to-reel tapes (in non negligible numbers)?
jacquesm 3y ago
"Home taping is killing music" The record companies did a fantastic job of killing music all by themselves, the quality has absolutely cratered and the occasional great artist that has made it through the long slog to recognition has done so despite the music industry, not because of. I spent a fortune on various formats and when streaming came along I simply refused to participate. I'm simply not going to pay a third time for music that I already legally own. Note that the following was written well before streaming came along, but it is an excellent article on the realities of the music industry from the artists perspective written by Janis Ian: https://web.archive.org/web/20070509181400/http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070509181400/http://www.janisi... There is a fair chance that if you're under 40 that you've never heard of her, but I suggest you give her music a try as well, it is at least as good as her writing. And another one by Courtney Love: https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  I pay for streaming music because I've pirated all my other music, and it's convenient. Quality is subjective, I'm no audiophile and unless I'm using it on the go with low data mode on, I can't hear the difference... except the one time with a more obscure song, but I reported that and they fixed it. Maybe that was an accidental low data mode though.
  - Lacerda69 3y ago
    Buy music directly from the artist. Streaming services are a cancer.
    - scblock 3y ago
      Streaming services can be an excellent music discovery platform.
  - antihero 3y ago
    I buy stuff with bandcamp, then import directly onto my navidrome server in ALAC.
whiddershins 3y ago
People laugh at all of this but Napster really did kill the music industry. No really. It did. And whatever it didn’t kill, YouTube did. So. Haha. Stupid musicians and their stupid stuffed suit execs. Lol.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  Maybe we do not need that industry to exist anymore. You have more than hundred years of backlog at your fingertips as well as new stuff going out constantly. Music is abundant.
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    Eventually to be automated too, by the likes of musicgen.
- decremental 3y ago
  [dead]
- pjc50 3y ago
  Funnily enough there still seems to be a music industry.
brianmcc 3y ago
Ha I do miss the whole "mix tapes" thing but my god the excitement and anticipation I had when CDs and CD players came along, to be able to play Track 6 by just... pressing the "6" button. Or a tap or two with the remote: "next"! No more rewinding/forwarding, remember counter numbers for tracks (0 -> 999). Just an amazing step up in UI but looking back "you had to be there" :-) Now though I just have about 600 CDs gathering dust on shelves, each one with memories from a time and place through the 80s, 90s and 00s, it's quite sad.
- 10729287 3y ago
  Why quite sad ? There's nothing like crawling a collection of physical records or books and remind "Oh, I remember when I used to listen to this like crazy" and being able to simply put the record in a player and listen it" That kind of serendipity is just not possible with digital collections, especially when records get deletted from services without notices, or you have to browse deep in a .mp3 collection you afforded not to lose by not backing it up.
  - brianmcc 3y ago
    It's nice to have those memories, for sure, but my CDs themselves get completely neglected nowadays - between mp3 rips, and streaming services conveniently tying in with my main hifi setup, the CDs just don't see active service any more. And my kids sure aren't interested :-D I used to love exploring friends' music collections, seeing where tastes overlap. "Everyone has everything via Spotify" completely eliminates this. And I don't see us going back in any substantially wider sense, the genie's out of the bottle. Ah the march of progress, eh...
- acomjean 3y ago
  >No more rewinding/forwarding You did get adept at looking at a record to figure out where the songs were based on the record track "texture". (our high school had a radio station, and records being the music mode at the time). To cue up the next song, we'd play the record into the song, take the payer "out of gear" and manually spin the record backwards while listening till we hit blank. We did this part off the air (most of the time..) We had this wierd cassette player boombox. It had 2 ff and rewinds, one of which would disable the pinch rollers, pull the tape head back a bit and fast forward the tape listening for blank areas, where upon it would stop. It worked but I'm guessing the wear and tear on the tapes must have been bad. Though we didn't notice. CDs were much better.
cubefox 3y ago
The reality is that yes, cassettes really were responsible for a substantial downturn in music revenue in the late 70s and early 80s: https://i.insider.com/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000 https://i.insider.com/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000 Then cassettes got replaced with CDs which (initially) were read only, which again saved the market from piracy ... until online piracy with Napster and MP3 players completely crushed the music market, but far worse than cassettes. Even 20 years later, the market still hasn't recovered to the level of peak CD revenue, despite the global economy growing substantially: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/US-recorded-music-revs-1999-v-2020.png https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/... Piracy may since have receded, but only due to Spotify / Apple Music dumping pricing.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  If anything cassettes served as a music discovery service before we had the ability to share links online. Pretty much everything I ever bought I discovered because someone borrowed me a tape or sent me one from abroad.
  - cubefox 3y ago
    But they also lead to a substantial decrease in music revenue, as the chart shows.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      What you think the chart shows. Commercial music had it's zenith and it declined. Just like everything else it didn't grow for ever and just like everything else there are reasons why you don't want to yank the chain of your consumers and your producers too much. The fact that the two correlate timewise does not mean the one cause the other. In fact I think that the music industry missed an absolutely huge opportunity. By the time I had digitized my whole collection they had royally missed the boat, whereas if I didn't have to go through all that who knows how much money I would have spent on new music by now. I used to spend a lot of money on music, now I spend none and not a dime of that difference was due to piracy. I have friends in the music industry and got invited to a meeting of BUMA/STEMRA regarding the potential of streaming and it was like watching dinosaurs discussing the price of swampland while in the background you could see a comet heading straight for the planet. I don't think I've ever seen such a disconnect between producers and consumers. Product market fit is not just good for new companies, it is also good for existing ones. Fail at that and you will fail.
praptak 3y ago
The content industry also waged war on computer media. It was supposed to be 100% forbidden to sell anything capable of doing anything without DRM. They were serious about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital_Television_Promotion_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital...
taffronaut 3y ago
The campaign also coincided with the rise of cassette-based portastudios for musicians. There was concern that any record industry levy on cassettes would unfairly hit (unsigned) musicians recording their own music for demos. I think it was Sound-on-Sound magazine which came up with the "Home taping is skill in music" slogan as a counter.
cafard 3y ago
And the movie and TV industries wanted in on videotape back then. I remember reading a piece by one of the then big lobby shops, arguing that VHS tapes should be a tax, the income to be distributed to the studios.
victorbjorklund 3y ago
In Sweden there is still a tax on cassette tapes that goes directly to artists... So if you buy a cassette tape (any cassette tape for any use) artists in Sweden gets a cut... Not sure how many people today use cassette tapes for piracy...
- bondarchuk 3y ago
  In the Netherlands there's a similar thing: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/intellectueel-eigendom/vraag-en-antwoord/hoe-hoog-is-de-thuiskopievergoeding https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/intellectueel-eigen... 2.60 eur for every tablet and PC 5.30 eur for every smartphone 80 cents for every hdd or ssd etc. etc, though I don't see CD-ROMs (nor tapes) in this list strangely enough. I wonder who actually gets this money in practice. 5 bucks per smartphone for some random non-profit is pretty huge!
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    > I wonder who actually gets this money in practice. The record companies and the top 10 or so of the artists.
  - somat 3y ago
    It would be interesting to see an audit on where the money actually goes. It is probably not "list occupation as drummer on your tax return and get a 25 euro buck credit"
toyg 3y ago
Can't believe nobody linked this masterpiece yet: https://youtu.be/R3jkUhG68wY https://youtu.be/R3jkUhG68wY "So put down that C90, next time we won't ask nicely"
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Priceless, love all the spoofs, especially the Buggles one :)
taylodl 3y ago
More like 'When Gene Simmons Waged War on the Cassette Tape During the 1980s.' It was as stupid as Lars Ulrich attacking Napster in the early 2000's. In both cases their respective bands, Kiss and Metallica, took a considerable hit in their popularity. Treating all your customers as though they are criminals turns out to not be a very good business practice.
hanniabu 3y ago
Looking forward to 20 years from now seeing the same posts about waging war on crypto
Jeslijar 3y ago
Is this really a problem? Revenue based on selling copies of a recording is down. The cost of reproducing copies is less than ever. The barrier to creating your own music and distributing it to everyone in the world is less than ever. All the middlemen cranking out wasteful copies of just one thing are not necessary since music is trivially reproduced with digital copies. How much should music make as an industry? Who should be making the money from the music that is made? how much money should you make off of a single song that is performed a single time? This is always a controversial issue. The loudest opinions typically say "they need to make more", which is the same opinion about nearly any profession in the entire world aside from the ones that make the very most money. Some musicians still fall into that category. At the end of the day the lion's share of revenue doesn't go to a performer anyway, it goes to middlemen who add no value to the actual performance - they just make it be distributed and decide the winners and losers based on arbitrary gatekeeping. The contracts are predatory and the whole thing seems f'd to me. I know many people with primary and side gigs as performance artists who don't make superstar money, there's no shortage. Live musical performance is all over the place and the ticket prices are outrageously high for any in-demand performance. Most of us don't have the option for income in perpetuity for work performed - we just get paid for hours worked. Is there an argument around payment in perpetuity vs pay for work performed that should apply across the board?
- EGreg 3y ago
  Yup! And the same can be said for your work also, if you produce digital content It will all become hobbies
  - TimPC 3y ago
    I think the big difference is some digital content has an exact audience and needs to be highly customized for them. For example, companies don't buy web apps and then modify them into the web app they want they program what they want from the frameworks they choose up. So while code is digital content, it's quite resistant to having its value lowered by copying.
- pessimizer 3y ago
Neff 3y ago
And then there are sites like https://bt.etree.org/ https://bt.etree.org/ where artists allow for free and open trading of live shows. Back in the day before high speed internet became common, you used to subscribe to mailing lists and send "B&Ps" (blanks and postage) of either cassettes or CDs to the person with the original copy and they would burn the copy onto your media and then mail it back. With bittorrent now it is a lot easier to get copies of live music, but it feels like the community that was there faded.
jesprenj 3y ago
> Attempts to levy a tax on blank cassettes didn’t get traction in the UK. In Slovenia, we pay a tax for blank media and audiovisual recorders. The law was put in place in 2020. Source: https://www.uradni-list.si/glasilo-uradni-list-rs/vsebina/2020-01-0119/skupni-sporazum-za-dolocitev-visine-nadomestil-za-tonsko-inali-vizualno-snemanje-ki-se-izvrsi-pod-pogoji-privatne-ali-druge-lastne-uporabe https://www.uradni-list.si/glasilo-uradni-list-rs/vsebina/20...
- ftrobro 3y ago
  Several countries have that tax. Here in Sweden we pay about $10 for every new computer, mobile phone, SSD etc just because we might store music on them. Quite absurd. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
  - throwawaymobule 3y ago
    Whenever I hear about these levies, I always wonder what's stopping someone from spinning up a 'record label' and attempting to claim the funds.
    - realusername 3y ago
      Don't know about other countries but in France it's a private monopoly granted by the law, you can't create one. Not sure how that's legal either with antitrust laws but that's low it works. (And it's as opaque as it sounds)
      - ftrobro 3y ago
        Private monopoly in Sweden too. But at least they're not hiding the fact that 22.5 % of the money they collect go to their own administration costs rather than to artists... https://issuu.com/ymrkommunikation/docs/23-1643_copyswede_fb2022_se_2 https://issuu.com/ymrkommunikation/docs/23-1643_copyswede_fb...
p0w3n3d 3y ago
Piracy is bad but killing internet with yet another DRM in your browser, and stupid laws ("if you workaround a protection, event if it is stupid, you're going to straight jail") makes us slaves to big corporations.
Ralfp 3y ago
Home taping is killing record industry profits! We left this side blank so you can help B-side on Dead Kennedys „ In God We Trust, Inc”
- crucialfelix 3y ago
  Home f**ing is killing prostitution Graffiti in a band practice space, written by a friend of mine
  - vestrigi 3y ago
    Responsible disclosure is killing the zero day industry
jjtheblunt 3y ago
"During the 1980s" was removed from the title. Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the Music Industry Waged War on the Cassette Tape During the 1980s, and Punk Bands Fought Back
karaterobot 3y ago
At any stage in the process, from sheet music, to home taping, to Napster and beyond, we could point at the previous era's panic and say "ha ha, those old fools, sheet music didn't kill our vibrant music culture", and then go on to assume that, quite likely, nothing ever could. And yet it sure seems like something is broken in the music industry in 2023. It feels like right now would be one of the least certain times in history to be a talented, dedicated musician who wants to make a living, let alone get rich and famous. So, something changed. I think the tendency for many people is to just say that the reason for all this is the greed of the non-artistic, non-consumer parts of the music industry, but certainly it has nothing to do with me or my choices. I think that's probably self-serving position, and if we really looked at it we would find ourselves uncomfortably in an ecosystem where consumers demand immediate fulfillment of their desire, the industry rushes to give it to them without thinking about the future, and artists either adapt, or get replaced. I did a lot of home taping. I did a lot of bittorrenting. Now I pay for Spotify, but haven't bought an album (physically or digitally) in years. I think I might have helped kill the music industry, and that's probably a bad thing.
- wilsonnb3 3y ago
  > It feels like right now would be one of the least certain times in history to be a talented, dedicated musician who wants to make a living, let alone get rich and famous. In recent history perhaps. For most of history making a living via music was very difficult and the current state is sort of a reversion to the historical norm after the recorded music boom distorted things for a century or so.
analog31 3y ago
Granted, this discussion is about the recording industry, but just as an aside, don't overlook local live music. I'm a jazz musician. The bands I play in don't record. It's not worth the cost. We play in smaller venues, where the stakes are not high enough for "business" to intrude on our playing. Each band plays a different style. More than one jazz band in my locale is playing creative original music, including one of my bands.

244 points by rcarmo 3y ago

andrewstuart 3y ago

I have some nostalgia for most technologies. Tapes and printers, not so much.

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
Tape is still amazing in terms of data density and storage longevity
- ggm 3y ago
  I could probably fit my entire MP3 collection as FLAC on a single DLT. Shame abou the seek times but some kind of lower bitrate forward coding across the entire dataset, a cache and seek times might not matter as much for long plays. It would be very silly to repurpose a DLT tape library for an audio jukebox: one which carried "lethal to enter if not disarmed" stickers and a ruinous electricity bill.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    At a half decent compression rate it probably fits on a large micro SD card as well, unless you have thousands of records.
  - meindnoch 3y ago
    Why would you store MP3 as FLAC?
    - ggm 3y ago
      I would re-encode from the original or get flac. What I have digitally is compressed because of history, more than anything else. It was a figure of speech. The point is a single DLT is huge. Well .. LTO.
      - Filligree 3y ago
        It’s just a pity they’re so expensive. By rights I should be using tape for my backups, but even a single tape drive is…
        ggm 3y ago
        For anyone who wonders a single LTO9 tape is about $250 and holds 45TB. I'm holding about 15 to 20 years data hoarding at home on 6TB zfs. So for me, cold storage for life would be at this price point. As you say the drive is heinous too: $10k+
- anonymous_sorry 3y ago
  Not analogue audio cassettes though. They would get tangled in the tape deck, and be ruined. They would sightly unspool themselves, get caught on something or twisted, and be ruined. They would stretch with overuse, distorting the audio horribly and/or comically, and be ruined. In my youth it seemed like every major roadside was littered with discarded audio tape. Clumps of tangled brown film dolefully flapping about in the breeze. This is not a format to be overly nostalgic for.
coldtea 3y ago
Tapes where great - if you mean audio tapes. Printers are crap even today.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Yeah, thankfully we don't need them that often anymore. That said, is there a convenient, compact printer for documents (greyscale is fine) for the just in case times? I think I've seen a compact bar shaped laser printer aimed at laptops, but I'm afraid of the toner cartridges being overpriced or hard to find.
  - soco 3y ago
    It will probably still run with the same Windows driver written in late 90's in Win16 then patched and glued and slightly tilted to kinda work even today, kinda. Because here's where the real adventure happens, between buggy drivers and prehistoric spoolers.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  Audio tapes were crap for most people. There was good tape certainly -- reel to reel, metal tapes, etc. But most people used the cheap normal tape, and probably C120 which had a tendency to get tangled in the mechanism. Modern dirt cheap 44.1 KHz/16 bit audio is far superior to anything you could get in the tape era, except maybe a reel to reel tape set to the high quality speed. And even the best tape still had some wow and flutter because it's ultimately a mechanical device with imperfect speed control.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    We did - briefly - have the DAT (digital audio tape) format.
    - flyinghamster 3y ago
      That got kneecapped by the recording industry [0], and the result was that consumer interest was near zero. Once recordable CDs and then MP3 and friends came on the scene, it was rendered irrelevant. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Copy_Management_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Copy_Management_System
Sosh101 3y ago
Tapes gave us the mix-tape - a beautiful thing for sharing.

thriftwy 3y ago

What's interesting, 1980s was the heyday of Russian Rock tape albums. Soviet government did actually go after artists for doing live concerts (on the grounds of illegal enterpreneurship†), but not after tape recording stuff. You could duplicate as many tape albums as you wished in specialized tape copying booths, as well as at home if you had the hardware. † You are probably wondering whether there was "legal" enterpreneurship option in the late USSR. Basically, nope, not before Perestroika kicked in.

citrin_ru 3y ago
Even before cassette tapes become available people in USSR recorded and copied music at home using reel-to-reel tapes. LP vinyl record was the most produced media back then but it was state controlled - even is some music was not outright censored it was not published in large enough numbers if state official though massed should not listen a particular music genre or a record. I wonder of people outside soviet block copied musing at home using reel-to-reel tapes (in non negligible numbers)?

jacquesm 3y ago

"Home taping is killing music" The record companies did a fantastic job of killing music all by themselves, the quality has absolutely cratered and the occasional great artist that has made it through the long slog to recognition has done so despite the music industry, not because of. I spent a fortune on various formats and when streaming came along I simply refused to participate. I'm simply not going to pay a third time for music that I already legally own. Note that the following was written well before streaming came along, but it is an excellent article on the realities of the music industry from the artists perspective written by Janis Ian: https://web.archive.org/web/20070509181400/http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070509181400/http://www.janisi... There is a fair chance that if you're under 40 that you've never heard of her, but I suggest you give her music a try as well, it is at least as good as her writing. And another one by Courtney Love: https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
I pay for streaming music because I've pirated all my other music, and it's convenient. Quality is subjective, I'm no audiophile and unless I'm using it on the go with low data mode on, I can't hear the difference... except the one time with a more obscure song, but I reported that and they fixed it. Maybe that was an accidental low data mode though.
- Lacerda69 3y ago
  Buy music directly from the artist. Streaming services are a cancer.
  - scblock 3y ago
    Streaming services can be an excellent music discovery platform.
- antihero 3y ago
  I buy stuff with bandcamp, then import directly onto my navidrome server in ALAC.

whiddershins 3y ago

People laugh at all of this but Napster really did kill the music industry. No really. It did. And whatever it didn’t kill, YouTube did. So. Haha. Stupid musicians and their stupid stuffed suit execs. Lol.

thriftwy 3y ago
Maybe we do not need that industry to exist anymore. You have more than hundred years of backlog at your fingertips as well as new stuff going out constantly. Music is abundant.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  Eventually to be automated too, by the likes of musicgen.
decremental 3y ago
[dead]
pjc50 3y ago
Funnily enough there still seems to be a music industry.

brianmcc 3y ago

Ha I do miss the whole "mix tapes" thing but my god the excitement and anticipation I had when CDs and CD players came along, to be able to play Track 6 by just... pressing the "6" button. Or a tap or two with the remote: "next"! No more rewinding/forwarding, remember counter numbers for tracks (0 -> 999). Just an amazing step up in UI but looking back "you had to be there" :-) Now though I just have about 600 CDs gathering dust on shelves, each one with memories from a time and place through the 80s, 90s and 00s, it's quite sad.

10729287 3y ago
Why quite sad ? There's nothing like crawling a collection of physical records or books and remind "Oh, I remember when I used to listen to this like crazy" and being able to simply put the record in a player and listen it" That kind of serendipity is just not possible with digital collections, especially when records get deletted from services without notices, or you have to browse deep in a .mp3 collection you afforded not to lose by not backing it up.
- brianmcc 3y ago
  It's nice to have those memories, for sure, but my CDs themselves get completely neglected nowadays - between mp3 rips, and streaming services conveniently tying in with my main hifi setup, the CDs just don't see active service any more. And my kids sure aren't interested :-D I used to love exploring friends' music collections, seeing where tastes overlap. "Everyone has everything via Spotify" completely eliminates this. And I don't see us going back in any substantially wider sense, the genie's out of the bottle. Ah the march of progress, eh...
acomjean 3y ago
>No more rewinding/forwarding You did get adept at looking at a record to figure out where the songs were based on the record track "texture". (our high school had a radio station, and records being the music mode at the time). To cue up the next song, we'd play the record into the song, take the payer "out of gear" and manually spin the record backwards while listening till we hit blank. We did this part off the air (most of the time..) We had this wierd cassette player boombox. It had 2 ff and rewinds, one of which would disable the pinch rollers, pull the tape head back a bit and fast forward the tape listening for blank areas, where upon it would stop. It worked but I'm guessing the wear and tear on the tapes must have been bad. Though we didn't notice. CDs were much better.

cubefox 3y ago

The reality is that yes, cassettes really were responsible for a substantial downturn in music revenue in the late 70s and early 80s: https://i.insider.com/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000 https://i.insider.com/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000 Then cassettes got replaced with CDs which (initially) were read only, which again saved the market from piracy ... until online piracy with Napster and MP3 players completely crushed the music market, but far worse than cassettes. Even 20 years later, the market still hasn't recovered to the level of peak CD revenue, despite the global economy growing substantially: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/US-recorded-music-revs-1999-v-2020.png https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/... Piracy may since have receded, but only due to Spotify / Apple Music dumping pricing.

jacquesm 3y ago
If anything cassettes served as a music discovery service before we had the ability to share links online. Pretty much everything I ever bought I discovered because someone borrowed me a tape or sent me one from abroad.
- cubefox 3y ago
  But they also lead to a substantial decrease in music revenue, as the chart shows.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    What you think the chart shows. Commercial music had it's zenith and it declined. Just like everything else it didn't grow for ever and just like everything else there are reasons why you don't want to yank the chain of your consumers and your producers too much. The fact that the two correlate timewise does not mean the one cause the other. In fact I think that the music industry missed an absolutely huge opportunity. By the time I had digitized my whole collection they had royally missed the boat, whereas if I didn't have to go through all that who knows how much money I would have spent on new music by now. I used to spend a lot of money on music, now I spend none and not a dime of that difference was due to piracy. I have friends in the music industry and got invited to a meeting of BUMA/STEMRA regarding the potential of streaming and it was like watching dinosaurs discussing the price of swampland while in the background you could see a comet heading straight for the planet. I don't think I've ever seen such a disconnect between producers and consumers. Product market fit is not just good for new companies, it is also good for existing ones. Fail at that and you will fail.

praptak 3y ago

The content industry also waged war on computer media. It was supposed to be 100% forbidden to sell anything capable of doing anything without DRM. They were serious about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital_Television_Promotion_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital...

taffronaut 3y ago

The campaign also coincided with the rise of cassette-based portastudios for musicians. There was concern that any record industry levy on cassettes would unfairly hit (unsigned) musicians recording their own music for demos. I think it was Sound-on-Sound magazine which came up with the "Home taping is skill in music" slogan as a counter.

cafard 3y ago

And the movie and TV industries wanted in on videotape back then. I remember reading a piece by one of the then big lobby shops, arguing that VHS tapes should be a tax, the income to be distributed to the studios.

victorbjorklund 3y ago

In Sweden there is still a tax on cassette tapes that goes directly to artists... So if you buy a cassette tape (any cassette tape for any use) artists in Sweden gets a cut... Not sure how many people today use cassette tapes for piracy...

bondarchuk 3y ago
In the Netherlands there's a similar thing: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/intellectueel-eigendom/vraag-en-antwoord/hoe-hoog-is-de-thuiskopievergoeding https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/intellectueel-eigen... 2.60 eur for every tablet and PC 5.30 eur for every smartphone 80 cents for every hdd or ssd etc. etc, though I don't see CD-ROMs (nor tapes) in this list strangely enough. I wonder who actually gets this money in practice. 5 bucks per smartphone for some random non-profit is pretty huge!
- jacquesm 3y ago
  > I wonder who actually gets this money in practice. The record companies and the top 10 or so of the artists.
- somat 3y ago
  It would be interesting to see an audit on where the money actually goes. It is probably not "list occupation as drummer on your tax return and get a 25 euro buck credit"

toyg 3y ago

Can't believe nobody linked this masterpiece yet: https://youtu.be/R3jkUhG68wY https://youtu.be/R3jkUhG68wY "So put down that C90, next time we won't ask nicely"

jacquesm 3y ago
Priceless, love all the spoofs, especially the Buggles one :)

taylodl 3y ago

More like 'When Gene Simmons Waged War on the Cassette Tape During the 1980s.' It was as stupid as Lars Ulrich attacking Napster in the early 2000's. In both cases their respective bands, Kiss and Metallica, took a considerable hit in their popularity. Treating all your customers as though they are criminals turns out to not be a very good business practice.

hanniabu 3y ago

Looking forward to 20 years from now seeing the same posts about waging war on crypto

Jeslijar 3y ago

Is this really a problem? Revenue based on selling copies of a recording is down. The cost of reproducing copies is less than ever. The barrier to creating your own music and distributing it to everyone in the world is less than ever. All the middlemen cranking out wasteful copies of just one thing are not necessary since music is trivially reproduced with digital copies. How much should music make as an industry? Who should be making the money from the music that is made? how much money should you make off of a single song that is performed a single time? This is always a controversial issue. The loudest opinions typically say "they need to make more", which is the same opinion about nearly any profession in the entire world aside from the ones that make the very most money. Some musicians still fall into that category. At the end of the day the lion's share of revenue doesn't go to a performer anyway, it goes to middlemen who add no value to the actual performance - they just make it be distributed and decide the winners and losers based on arbitrary gatekeeping. The contracts are predatory and the whole thing seems f'd to me. I know many people with primary and side gigs as performance artists who don't make superstar money, there's no shortage. Live musical performance is all over the place and the ticket prices are outrageously high for any in-demand performance. Most of us don't have the option for income in perpetuity for work performed - we just get paid for hours worked. Is there an argument around payment in perpetuity vs pay for work performed that should apply across the board?

EGreg 3y ago
Yup! And the same can be said for your work also, if you produce digital content It will all become hobbies
- TimPC 3y ago
  I think the big difference is some digital content has an exact audience and needs to be highly customized for them. For example, companies don't buy web apps and then modify them into the web app they want they program what they want from the frameworks they choose up. So while code is digital content, it's quite resistant to having its value lowered by copying.
pessimizer 3y ago

Neff 3y ago

And then there are sites like https://bt.etree.org/ https://bt.etree.org/ where artists allow for free and open trading of live shows. Back in the day before high speed internet became common, you used to subscribe to mailing lists and send "B&Ps" (blanks and postage) of either cassettes or CDs to the person with the original copy and they would burn the copy onto your media and then mail it back. With bittorrent now it is a lot easier to get copies of live music, but it feels like the community that was there faded.

jesprenj 3y ago

> Attempts to levy a tax on blank cassettes didn’t get traction in the UK. In Slovenia, we pay a tax for blank media and audiovisual recorders. The law was put in place in 2020. Source: https://www.uradni-list.si/glasilo-uradni-list-rs/vsebina/2020-01-0119/skupni-sporazum-za-dolocitev-visine-nadomestil-za-tonsko-inali-vizualno-snemanje-ki-se-izvrsi-pod-pogoji-privatne-ali-druge-lastne-uporabe https://www.uradni-list.si/glasilo-uradni-list-rs/vsebina/20...

ftrobro 3y ago
Several countries have that tax. Here in Sweden we pay about $10 for every new computer, mobile phone, SSD etc just because we might store music on them. Quite absurd. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
- throwawaymobule 3y ago
  Whenever I hear about these levies, I always wonder what's stopping someone from spinning up a 'record label' and attempting to claim the funds.
  - realusername 3y ago
    Don't know about other countries but in France it's a private monopoly granted by the law, you can't create one. Not sure how that's legal either with antitrust laws but that's low it works. (And it's as opaque as it sounds)
    - ftrobro 3y ago
      Private monopoly in Sweden too. But at least they're not hiding the fact that 22.5 % of the money they collect go to their own administration costs rather than to artists... https://issuu.com/ymrkommunikation/docs/23-1643_copyswede_fb2022_se_2 https://issuu.com/ymrkommunikation/docs/23-1643_copyswede_fb...

p0w3n3d 3y ago

Piracy is bad but killing internet with yet another DRM in your browser, and stupid laws ("if you workaround a protection, event if it is stupid, you're going to straight jail") makes us slaves to big corporations.

Ralfp 3y ago

Home taping is killing record industry profits! We left this side blank so you can help B-side on Dead Kennedys „ In God We Trust, Inc”

crucialfelix 3y ago
Home f**ing is killing prostitution Graffiti in a band practice space, written by a friend of mine
- vestrigi 3y ago
  Responsible disclosure is killing the zero day industry

jjtheblunt 3y ago

"During the 1980s" was removed from the title. Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the Music Industry Waged War on the Cassette Tape During the 1980s, and Punk Bands Fought Back

karaterobot 3y ago

At any stage in the process, from sheet music, to home taping, to Napster and beyond, we could point at the previous era's panic and say "ha ha, those old fools, sheet music didn't kill our vibrant music culture", and then go on to assume that, quite likely, nothing ever could. And yet it sure seems like something is broken in the music industry in 2023. It feels like right now would be one of the least certain times in history to be a talented, dedicated musician who wants to make a living, let alone get rich and famous. So, something changed. I think the tendency for many people is to just say that the reason for all this is the greed of the non-artistic, non-consumer parts of the music industry, but certainly it has nothing to do with me or my choices. I think that's probably self-serving position, and if we really looked at it we would find ourselves uncomfortably in an ecosystem where consumers demand immediate fulfillment of their desire, the industry rushes to give it to them without thinking about the future, and artists either adapt, or get replaced. I did a lot of home taping. I did a lot of bittorrenting. Now I pay for Spotify, but haven't bought an album (physically or digitally) in years. I think I might have helped kill the music industry, and that's probably a bad thing.

wilsonnb3 3y ago
> It feels like right now would be one of the least certain times in history to be a talented, dedicated musician who wants to make a living, let alone get rich and famous. In recent history perhaps. For most of history making a living via music was very difficult and the current state is sort of a reversion to the historical norm after the recorded music boom distorted things for a century or so.

analog31 3y ago

Granted, this discussion is about the recording industry, but just as an aside, don't overlook local live music. I'm a jazz musician. The bands I play in don't record. It's not worth the cost. We play in smaller venues, where the stakes are not high enough for "business" to intrude on our playing. Each band plays a different style. More than one jazz band in my locale is playing creative original music, including one of my bands.