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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/4d5

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.
  - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
    That juncture was a very distinct divide in pop music. The peak is likely around the peak of disco (Staying Alive: 1977). The post-peak of disco was kind of barren until the 1980s / MTV scene starting things going again. I think the collapse is due to the death of vinyl, which was probably associated with disco and older dying styles. CDs could always be recorded to cassettes. It was just an audio stream you could feed to the cassette player. So pirates and swappers wouldn't have cared that much. And the sales peak of cassettes is during the late 1980s. So that was well after the collapse of sales.
  - kzrdude 3y ago
    How do you see that in the chart?
realusername 3y ago
The hole in revenue in the early 2000 was because pirating was the only real option to get music online, you had no other choice. The music industry was too stubborn to consider selling online and preferred to keep selling CDs, they were very very late to adapt and lost some revenue because of that.
- toyg 3y ago
  By doing that, they also ensured that consumers went to great lengths to produce good-quality rips of their full catalogs, effectively establishing large libraries of content ready to be distributed for free. Thanks to reasonable streaming prices, my children will likely never have to know what a bitrate is, whereas I was forced to develop a full range of "pirate skills".
  - cubefox 3y ago
    > Thanks to reasonable streaming prices What you view as reasonable is so low that musicians hardly make any money from it.
    - zirgs 3y ago
      Well, before spotify they made zero money from me and a lot of other people. Spotify also allowed a lot more people to publish their music. Increased supply and higher competition leads to lower prices. 1999 with its overpriced CDs is never coming back.
      - cubefox 3y ago
        > Increased supply and higher competition leads to lower prices. The "supply" of music, including music sold on CDs, is equally unlimited. What leads to the low Spotify price is that they have to compete with music piracy. CD prices weren't higher because CDs were expensive to manufacture and therefore limited in supply -- they weren't. Instead, they were more expensive because they didn't have to compete against piracy.
colonwqbang 3y ago
CDs used to be crazy expensive. They cost much more than what was reasonable. Today I have access to untold thousands of records for €10 per month. That money (non inflation adjusted) would have bought me only a single record back in the day. One could argue that the current price of music is too low. But the price they tried to extract back then was completely unreasonable and I think those excesses contributed heavily to the current situation.
- expertentipp 3y ago
  > But the price they tried to extract back then was completely unreasonable and I think those excesses contributed heavily to the current situation. Yes that left incurable trauma. During late 90s to early 00s CD costed the same in Germany and in any post-communist country whose economies were in shambles. Something around 12 EUR which would be 18 EUR inflation adjusted now. I was wandering between shelves like a pariah and asking shop assistant like a beggar to insert the CD into the player so I could listen it in shop for few minutes. Music industry worked hard to make enemies for life.
  - zirgs 3y ago
    Everyone pirated in the Eastern Europe back then. You bought a CD only if you were a big fan of the band. The rest was downloaded off the net. I've never bought a single CD in my life. Transitioned straight from pirating to Spotify.
    - expertentipp 3y ago
      Ha! the dial up internet was ruled by extortionist state monopoly and local ISPs were plagued with equipment thievery... the only way to acquire pirated music was physically exchanging hard drives with acquaintances.
      - zirgs 3y ago
        That was true in the late 1990s, but by mid-2000s everyone could get fast internet with no data caps. That's when Steam started taking off, but music industry was still stuck in the previous century.
zirgs 3y ago
This kinda explains the anti-piracy hysteria of the 2000s.
- uhmyeh 3y ago
  And their resurgence with AI and Google’s web integrity thing The web is just TV3.0, reserved for acceptable political and commercial content now. Eh I’m done with that; switching off to all of it. Will stick to internet for job and not use it on my personal desktop, just phone. Copyright rent seekers can do something useful for humanity or stick to making it about “the art” and perform local theatre
  - EGreg 3y ago
    You can’t opt of it, your friends will make decisions that affect you, bother you with political opinions, share your photos etc.
    - uhmyeh 3y ago
      It’s a good thing my friends also hate the web. I was pretty much the lone holdout “Opt out” from my references frame; I will use a gmail for government and services as expected, and do nothing else online but what my job asks. I’m done scrolling and collecting useless knowledge and anecdotes I literally just switched to shit tier ISP speeds Fortunately I deleted TwitFace a decade ago Will be blacklisting HN, Reddit on the router end Down to a stupid beefy ML machine through work, personal iPhone and old MacBook Air running Linux; feels good man dog
  - mindslight 3y ago
    > not use [Internet] on my personal desktop, just phone. Then you'll be headed in the exact wrong direction! Phones are generally locked down corporate platforms, where Google's current attempt to lock down the web got its inspiration and start (see: SafetyNet). Even if you do repave and install an OS that represents your interests, the input/output capabilities are by default limited and the available apps still generally revolve around accessing centralized services hosted elsewhere. Whereas with your personal desktop, you can keep it personal and install libre software that lets you escape the copyright cartel and big tech walled gardens.
akino_germany 3y ago
If you need a legend for the second chart, here it is: physical music videos (yellow); CD singles (light orange); CD albums (dark orange); cassette singles (light blue); cassette albums (Carolina blue); vinyl LP/EPs (darker blue); download singles (purple); ringtone/ringbacks (periwinkle); download albums (dark purple); SoundExchange distributions (lime green); synchronization (light gray); free streaming (green); paid streaming subscriptions (dark green)
hbossy 3y ago
The sulfur mining industry never recovered from the drop in revenue after someone discovered a way to extract it on scale from low-quality coal. Poland had a massive drop in revenue despite being the one selling both products. Does it mean they should attach a coal burning license agreement prohibiting the extraction process to each container, or try to prosecute people selling filters?
- cubefox 3y ago
  Piracy was illegal long before cassettes or Napster were invented. Sulfur extraction was always legal, and for good reason.
  - Chiba-City 3y ago
    [dead]
  - EGreg 3y ago
    So the laws were misguided. Why should someone be granted a monopoly on excluding others from using an idea (patent) or content (copyright)? To prop up a business model that cannot be sustained except if based on threats of violence?
fipar 3y ago
That graph does not show cassettes were responsible for that, it just shows revenue numbers. There are other possible causes. As someone who lived through part of that (I’m from ‘78 but for a country that was lagging in media developments; we got CDs in the early 90s) I can say that cassettes were a lousy medium. I love them because I grew up with my Walkman and I loved the tape swapping scene (physically compiled and traded playlists, for those young enough to not have participated), but objectively they sucked. Even the best tapes eventually had hiss if you played them enough times. Yet they were not sold at a significantly lower price to compensate this. I mean vinyl decays too but a good pressing handled with care will outlive you (for real, I’ve got plenty of great-sounding LPs from my grandma, and she’s been dead for 8 years), but after paying a high price for a cassette only to have it sound like crap after not that much time, you wouldn’t fall for that trap too often. You’d make a copy right after buying, and then share more copies with others too. You say that cassettes were responsible for that drop in revenue and I disagree (though of course respect your opinion), but I say the climb once CDs came in could also be interpreted as people willing to buy music just fine provided it sounded good and kept sounding good. I mean it’s not like cassettes went away as a piracy medium once CDs came in, yet revenue climbed anyway.
- cubefox 3y ago
  > That graph does not show cassettes were responsible for that, it just shows revenue numbers. There are other possible causes. You don't mention any of these possible causes though. > interpreted as people willing to buy music just fine provided it sounded good and kept sounding good Yes, CDs replaced cassettes and records. They had better audio quality and were nearly as small as cassettes. But cassettes weren't much worse overall than records. The audio quality wasn't as good as vinyl (though that came mostly from cheaper tapes, good tapes has fairly competitive audio) and aged more quickly, but they were much smaller, which was a big advantage. So overall, cassette piracy was competitive with vinyl sales, but not with CD sales.
  - fipar 3y ago
    > You don't mention any of these possible causes though. I did not, but I was responding to your "The reality is that yes, cassettes really were responsible" which to me reads like a statement of fact and not one of possible cause. The fact remains that the graph you shared does not proof cassettes were responsible for that. Another possibility is that music revenue around that 1976 peak shown in your graph is due to wider reasons (e.g., '74 and '75 had negative GDP growth, then positive for a few years, then negative in '80 and '82 with a positive '81, that actually matches the revenue graph to some extent, so I don't think it's an established fact that cassettes were the cause for this. As a disclaimer though, I'll admit my opinion is tainted by the fact that the record companies were pushing that 'cassettes are killing music' agenda, which I disagree with, so I'm certainly biased in my views.
SoftTalker 3y ago
In the 1980s there was a record store where I lived that sold "used" records and tapes. Their hook was that they'd take any record back within a week of purchase. I think they witheld a dollar or two on the refund. So you'd go in, buy a record and a blank cassette, go home and make a tape of the record, then return the record. My friends and I did this countless times. If there was a record we all liked we'd just buy more tapes and make a copy for each of us. If this was a common thing in other towns, I can see why it reduced revenue. Even if this exact model was unusual, you could still borrow records from friends and make tape copies, so only one of you had to buy the record.
- kenjackson 3y ago
  Making copies of cassettes was just standard practice. A new album came out and we’d all chip in for one and then copy the rest onto cassettes using the double speed cassette copying that was standard in most stereos.
nitwit005 3y ago
I'm a little doubtful piracy is the main driving force there, until digital music became common. They charged more for CDs, and they became cheaper to make than tapes, so naturally revenue went up. Music videos, and a few super successful pop stars, greatly increased interest in pop music for a period, but that tapered off.
pessimizer 3y ago
The late 70s and early 80s was the dawn of tape trading, punk rock, rap, metal, and disco. 90% of it was only available through tape trading (or runs of 200 singles) because everyone had been shut out of a stagnant industry that was resting on AOR, super-decadent and overproduced prog, and continuing to throw money at the people who made money in the 60s. As the 80s started, the record companies caught on and adjusted by hiring new A&R and getting into the clubs again. Then MTV happened.
croes 3y ago
How could the CD save the market from piracy? With a simple cassette recorder with microphone or other audio input you could copy any CD.
- ben7799 3y ago
  You could copy the CD but the copy wasn't as good as the CD. Everyone bought CDs when they got popular because: - They sounded better - They didn't wear out from playing them - Small/Portable/Durable - Easy to move between tracks - No need to flip them to go to the other side (some cassette players eventually figured out how to do this without a flip)
  - croes 3y ago
    If you have the choice between a cassette copy, to which people were already used to, and no copy, people would choose the cassette copy. CDs made the source better because the sound was better than the sound of original cassettes.
gardenhedge 3y ago
I mean the top musicians are still millionaires so I don't feel too sorry for them
indymike 3y ago
> Then cassettes got replaced with CDs which (initially) were read only, which again saved the market from piracy CD players hit the market in the mid 80s (I got my first one in 1988). The effect of cassette tapes would have really hit in the late 70s and early 80s as high bias tapes hit the market. In the 90s, CD players became affordable. Also, there was a big price difference between a cassette and a CD. Cassette was about $8 for a new album, CD was $14.

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.
- AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  That juncture was a very distinct divide in pop music. The peak is likely around the peak of disco (Staying Alive: 1977). The post-peak of disco was kind of barren until the 1980s / MTV scene starting things going again. I think the collapse is due to the death of vinyl, which was probably associated with disco and older dying styles. CDs could always be recorded to cassettes. It was just an audio stream you could feed to the cassette player. So pirates and swappers wouldn't have cared that much. And the sales peak of cassettes is during the late 1980s. So that was well after the collapse of sales.
- kzrdude 3y ago
  How do you see that in the chart?

realusername 3y ago

The hole in revenue in the early 2000 was because pirating was the only real option to get music online, you had no other choice. The music industry was too stubborn to consider selling online and preferred to keep selling CDs, they were very very late to adapt and lost some revenue because of that.

toyg 3y ago
By doing that, they also ensured that consumers went to great lengths to produce good-quality rips of their full catalogs, effectively establishing large libraries of content ready to be distributed for free. Thanks to reasonable streaming prices, my children will likely never have to know what a bitrate is, whereas I was forced to develop a full range of "pirate skills".
- cubefox 3y ago
  > Thanks to reasonable streaming prices What you view as reasonable is so low that musicians hardly make any money from it.
  - zirgs 3y ago
    Well, before spotify they made zero money from me and a lot of other people. Spotify also allowed a lot more people to publish their music. Increased supply and higher competition leads to lower prices. 1999 with its overpriced CDs is never coming back.
    - cubefox 3y ago
      > Increased supply and higher competition leads to lower prices. The "supply" of music, including music sold on CDs, is equally unlimited. What leads to the low Spotify price is that they have to compete with music piracy. CD prices weren't higher because CDs were expensive to manufacture and therefore limited in supply -- they weren't. Instead, they were more expensive because they didn't have to compete against piracy.

colonwqbang 3y ago

CDs used to be crazy expensive. They cost much more than what was reasonable. Today I have access to untold thousands of records for €10 per month. That money (non inflation adjusted) would have bought me only a single record back in the day. One could argue that the current price of music is too low. But the price they tried to extract back then was completely unreasonable and I think those excesses contributed heavily to the current situation.

expertentipp 3y ago
> But the price they tried to extract back then was completely unreasonable and I think those excesses contributed heavily to the current situation. Yes that left incurable trauma. During late 90s to early 00s CD costed the same in Germany and in any post-communist country whose economies were in shambles. Something around 12 EUR which would be 18 EUR inflation adjusted now. I was wandering between shelves like a pariah and asking shop assistant like a beggar to insert the CD into the player so I could listen it in shop for few minutes. Music industry worked hard to make enemies for life.
- zirgs 3y ago
  Everyone pirated in the Eastern Europe back then. You bought a CD only if you were a big fan of the band. The rest was downloaded off the net. I've never bought a single CD in my life. Transitioned straight from pirating to Spotify.
  - expertentipp 3y ago
    Ha! the dial up internet was ruled by extortionist state monopoly and local ISPs were plagued with equipment thievery... the only way to acquire pirated music was physically exchanging hard drives with acquaintances.
    - zirgs 3y ago
      That was true in the late 1990s, but by mid-2000s everyone could get fast internet with no data caps. That's when Steam started taking off, but music industry was still stuck in the previous century.

zirgs 3y ago

This kinda explains the anti-piracy hysteria of the 2000s.

uhmyeh 3y ago
And their resurgence with AI and Google’s web integrity thing The web is just TV3.0, reserved for acceptable political and commercial content now. Eh I’m done with that; switching off to all of it. Will stick to internet for job and not use it on my personal desktop, just phone. Copyright rent seekers can do something useful for humanity or stick to making it about “the art” and perform local theatre
- EGreg 3y ago
  You can’t opt of it, your friends will make decisions that affect you, bother you with political opinions, share your photos etc.
  - uhmyeh 3y ago
    It’s a good thing my friends also hate the web. I was pretty much the lone holdout “Opt out” from my references frame; I will use a gmail for government and services as expected, and do nothing else online but what my job asks. I’m done scrolling and collecting useless knowledge and anecdotes I literally just switched to shit tier ISP speeds Fortunately I deleted TwitFace a decade ago Will be blacklisting HN, Reddit on the router end Down to a stupid beefy ML machine through work, personal iPhone and old MacBook Air running Linux; feels good man dog
- mindslight 3y ago
  > not use [Internet] on my personal desktop, just phone. Then you'll be headed in the exact wrong direction! Phones are generally locked down corporate platforms, where Google's current attempt to lock down the web got its inspiration and start (see: SafetyNet). Even if you do repave and install an OS that represents your interests, the input/output capabilities are by default limited and the available apps still generally revolve around accessing centralized services hosted elsewhere. Whereas with your personal desktop, you can keep it personal and install libre software that lets you escape the copyright cartel and big tech walled gardens.

akino_germany 3y ago

If you need a legend for the second chart, here it is: physical music videos (yellow); CD singles (light orange); CD albums (dark orange); cassette singles (light blue); cassette albums (Carolina blue); vinyl LP/EPs (darker blue); download singles (purple); ringtone/ringbacks (periwinkle); download albums (dark purple); SoundExchange distributions (lime green); synchronization (light gray); free streaming (green); paid streaming subscriptions (dark green)

hbossy 3y ago

The sulfur mining industry never recovered from the drop in revenue after someone discovered a way to extract it on scale from low-quality coal. Poland had a massive drop in revenue despite being the one selling both products. Does it mean they should attach a coal burning license agreement prohibiting the extraction process to each container, or try to prosecute people selling filters?

cubefox 3y ago
Piracy was illegal long before cassettes or Napster were invented. Sulfur extraction was always legal, and for good reason.
- Chiba-City 3y ago
  [dead]
- EGreg 3y ago
  So the laws were misguided. Why should someone be granted a monopoly on excluding others from using an idea (patent) or content (copyright)? To prop up a business model that cannot be sustained except if based on threats of violence?

fipar 3y ago

That graph does not show cassettes were responsible for that, it just shows revenue numbers. There are other possible causes. As someone who lived through part of that (I’m from ‘78 but for a country that was lagging in media developments; we got CDs in the early 90s) I can say that cassettes were a lousy medium. I love them because I grew up with my Walkman and I loved the tape swapping scene (physically compiled and traded playlists, for those young enough to not have participated), but objectively they sucked. Even the best tapes eventually had hiss if you played them enough times. Yet they were not sold at a significantly lower price to compensate this. I mean vinyl decays too but a good pressing handled with care will outlive you (for real, I’ve got plenty of great-sounding LPs from my grandma, and she’s been dead for 8 years), but after paying a high price for a cassette only to have it sound like crap after not that much time, you wouldn’t fall for that trap too often. You’d make a copy right after buying, and then share more copies with others too. You say that cassettes were responsible for that drop in revenue and I disagree (though of course respect your opinion), but I say the climb once CDs came in could also be interpreted as people willing to buy music just fine provided it sounded good and kept sounding good. I mean it’s not like cassettes went away as a piracy medium once CDs came in, yet revenue climbed anyway.

cubefox 3y ago
> That graph does not show cassettes were responsible for that, it just shows revenue numbers. There are other possible causes. You don't mention any of these possible causes though. > interpreted as people willing to buy music just fine provided it sounded good and kept sounding good Yes, CDs replaced cassettes and records. They had better audio quality and were nearly as small as cassettes. But cassettes weren't much worse overall than records. The audio quality wasn't as good as vinyl (though that came mostly from cheaper tapes, good tapes has fairly competitive audio) and aged more quickly, but they were much smaller, which was a big advantage. So overall, cassette piracy was competitive with vinyl sales, but not with CD sales.
- fipar 3y ago
  > You don't mention any of these possible causes though. I did not, but I was responding to your "The reality is that yes, cassettes really were responsible" which to me reads like a statement of fact and not one of possible cause. The fact remains that the graph you shared does not proof cassettes were responsible for that. Another possibility is that music revenue around that 1976 peak shown in your graph is due to wider reasons (e.g., '74 and '75 had negative GDP growth, then positive for a few years, then negative in '80 and '82 with a positive '81, that actually matches the revenue graph to some extent, so I don't think it's an established fact that cassettes were the cause for this. As a disclaimer though, I'll admit my opinion is tainted by the fact that the record companies were pushing that 'cassettes are killing music' agenda, which I disagree with, so I'm certainly biased in my views.

SoftTalker 3y ago

In the 1980s there was a record store where I lived that sold "used" records and tapes. Their hook was that they'd take any record back within a week of purchase. I think they witheld a dollar or two on the refund. So you'd go in, buy a record and a blank cassette, go home and make a tape of the record, then return the record. My friends and I did this countless times. If there was a record we all liked we'd just buy more tapes and make a copy for each of us. If this was a common thing in other towns, I can see why it reduced revenue. Even if this exact model was unusual, you could still borrow records from friends and make tape copies, so only one of you had to buy the record.

kenjackson 3y ago
Making copies of cassettes was just standard practice. A new album came out and we’d all chip in for one and then copy the rest onto cassettes using the double speed cassette copying that was standard in most stereos.

nitwit005 3y ago

I'm a little doubtful piracy is the main driving force there, until digital music became common. They charged more for CDs, and they became cheaper to make than tapes, so naturally revenue went up. Music videos, and a few super successful pop stars, greatly increased interest in pop music for a period, but that tapered off.

pessimizer 3y ago

The late 70s and early 80s was the dawn of tape trading, punk rock, rap, metal, and disco. 90% of it was only available through tape trading (or runs of 200 singles) because everyone had been shut out of a stagnant industry that was resting on AOR, super-decadent and overproduced prog, and continuing to throw money at the people who made money in the 60s. As the 80s started, the record companies caught on and adjusted by hiring new A&R and getting into the clubs again. Then MTV happened.

croes 3y ago

How could the CD save the market from piracy? With a simple cassette recorder with microphone or other audio input you could copy any CD.

ben7799 3y ago
You could copy the CD but the copy wasn't as good as the CD. Everyone bought CDs when they got popular because: - They sounded better - They didn't wear out from playing them - Small/Portable/Durable - Easy to move between tracks - No need to flip them to go to the other side (some cassette players eventually figured out how to do this without a flip)
- croes 3y ago
  If you have the choice between a cassette copy, to which people were already used to, and no copy, people would choose the cassette copy. CDs made the source better because the sound was better than the sound of original cassettes.

gardenhedge 3y ago

I mean the top musicians are still millionaires so I don't feel too sorry for them

indymike 3y ago

> Then cassettes got replaced with CDs which (initially) were read only, which again saved the market from piracy CD players hit the market in the mid 80s (I got my first one in 1988). The effect of cassette tapes would have really hit in the late 70s and early 80s as high bias tapes hit the market. In the 90s, CD players became affordable. Also, there was a big price difference between a cassette and a CD. Cassette was about $8 for a new album, CD was $14.