The death of the cassette tape... or not

When Ottens and his team introduced the compact cassette to the world in 1962, little could they have envisioned how far into the future their product would impact music lovers and the music industry. — SUJESH PAVITHRAN

If you’re a 40-something music fan or older, the likelihood is high that during a lengthy phase in your life, the primary medium for music playback/storage was the compact cassette tape. Mine certainly was, for almost three decades from the mid-1970s onwards. In fact, I still have a handful of these cassette gathering dust. The last tape deck I owned, a Nakamichi DR-3, left the building more than a decade ago... and since then, I have not listened to a cassette.

The man credited with inventing the cassette tape, Dutch engineer Lou Ottens, died aged 94 on March 6. When he and his team introduced the compact cassette to the world in 1962, little could they have envisioned how far into the future their product would impact music lovers and the music industry. “Tape” itself wasn’t new back then, having been around for a number of years in various formats, the most significant of which was the open reel. But the open-reel or reel-to-reel deck, and its predecessors and peers were cumbersome machines, despite possessing a high level of audio fidelity. The cassette tape was, well, compact... it became massively successful over the next 40 years, selling in excess of a hundred billion units!