Back in the day, music lovers could choose between vinyl records (called LPs, 45s and 78s) or audio cassette tapes. While vinyl records are played on a turntable or record player and were generally non-portable, cassette tapes offered a few advantages including portability and also helped to spawn several phenomenons in music such as mix tapes.
Cassette tapes are a portable music format that are smaller and less breakable than vinyl records. The Walkman and other music players functioned solely with cassettes and they tended to be slightly cheaper to purchase than vinyl records. But the music quality isn’t as good as vinyl and cassettes are easily damaged in a cassette player.
For this article, I’ll alternate between present and past tense because while cassettes (and vinyl) are still available today and are growing (again) in popularity, the fact is that the playback options for each were more limited in the past than they are today.
Cassette tape pros and cons
Audio cassette tapes had a number of features and benefits but a few downsides too. Here are the main ones.
| Audio cassette tape pros | Audio cassette tape cons |
| Music became easily portable at a time when the only alternative format was vinyl which was generally played on a record player set up in your home. | Cassette tapes are easily damaged when they get stuck in a cassette player or were left in direct sunlight. |
| Tapes were slightly cheaper to purchase new than vinyl LPs. I recall album cassettes being $1 cheaper than the LP vinyl version. | Music quality isn’t as good as vinyl and background noise, hissing and other sounds often occurred. |
| The Sony Walkman and other small portable devices were solely designed to play cassettes, until CDs came along. | The quality of the cassette recording degrades over time with regular use. |
| Cassette tapes inspired the mixtape phenomenon for road trips and other uses. | They died out pretty quickly once Compact Disc (CD) technology came out, since the cassette technology was vastly inferior. |
| Cassette singles were introduced which generally offered 1 song on each side at a lower price than a complete album to compete with 45 RPM records. | Cassette tapes often unraveled and you had to use a pencil or other method to rewind it and tighten the slack. |
| You could record your voice on a cassette tape to mail to friends in lieu of sending a letter. Remember, the Internet didn’t exist so it was either this or an expensive long distance phone call. | The Rewind and Fast Forward features were imprecise – unlike digital CDs which are very precise – so moving between songs was guesswork. |
| Cassette tapes were better than 8 track tapes. If you had 8 tracks, you know what I mean. | The Rewind and Fast Forward features of a cassette tape can be very slow certainly compared to a CD which quickly jumps to each song selection. |
| Offered a physical music format that is easy to hold, touch and experience and was widely sold and thus easily available. | Music quality might be slightly worse if you only had a low quality cassette player. |
| Cassette tapes were more compact and took up much less space in a collection than LP vinyl records. | Tapes could be accidentally recorded over if your dad didn’t realize the Rush Permanent Waves cassette was a commercial album you’d bought and not a blank tape. True story. |
Cassette tape quirks and features
Having been born in 1970, my early music consumption was about 80/20 cassette tapes to vinyl records. As I got older I purchased more cassettes than vinyl since cassettes were more usable. You needed a record player to play vinyl whereas a cassette over time, offered many more playback options.
Unlike vinyl, you could buy blank cassette tapes that meant you could either (illegally) tape music off the radio (everyone did it) or tape a voice recording instead of sending a friend a letter. So you could effectively record a long tape of yourself speaking for example and mail it to a friend who lived abroad. This was at a time when long distance phone calls could be very expensive.
Some later models of cassette players actually had double cassette decks on them, so they could take two tapes. This enabled you to tape record a cassette (again, illegal but everyone did it) that you borrowed from your friend so you didn’t have to buy it yourself.
Even later cassette players had a fast record feature that would speed record a cassette in much less time than playing it at regular speed.
If you bought a home entertainment system that included a record player and cassette player combined, you could tape record your vinyl albums too.
Click here to learn more about vinyl records and here for more info on audio cassettes.