THE READING ROOM: ‘High Bias’ Unfurls the History of Cassette Tapes

Somewhere between vinyl records and CDs, music lovers started collecting their favorites on a small, portable product that could hold 60-90 minutes of recorded music: the cassette tape.

Although the technology of storing music on cassettes was available in the early 1960s, it took devices such as Sony’s Walkman — or cars with tape decks — for the cassette to gain popularity as a relatively inexpensive method of delivering music. Who remembers changing out the 8-track player in the Camaro for a cassette player so they could blast the latest Edgar Winter or Motown music cassette? Or trying to record a favorite song from the radio by placing the tape recorder microphone as close as possible to the radio’s speakers? Some of us carried portable tape players into concerts hoping to record the night’s music, though the sound was usually crappy and muffled. And of course there were those mixtapes we made for best friends, lovers or crushes, or bandmates who lived in another town. It all feels like a long time ago, but in the past decade, cassette tapes have made somewhat of a comeback.

In his entertaining book, High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape, Marc Masters unravels the history, the mystery, and the enduring attraction of this technology. Why do we love cassettes so much, he asks? “The cassette tape is revolutionary,” he writes. “It’s small, it’s cheap, it’s easy to use. It’s not necessarily more foolproof than a record — in fact you can screw it up even worse, and it can even just screw up on its own. But when a record gets scratched, it sounds annoying. When a tape warbles or flutters or wrinkles, it sounds … kind of cool? It makes you think, what if other music sounded that way? What if my music sounded that way?”

As Masters hints at in this passage, cassettes allow people to do more than just record music the way they hear it. They can record wonderfully strange sounds by slowing down or speeding up the tape. Musicians can be inventive with these small containers of sound, creating new sounds or recording over earlier sounds in the name of economy, thereby preserving one moment by erasing another. In part, this ability to make the new from the old is one of cassettes’ main attractions: “Every person who encounters a tape adds something to that story, whether by listening to it, recording over it, or passing it on,” Masters writes. “That’s why this story is still going — because every cassette tape offers a chance to do something new.”

The development of new technology on which to play and record cassettes made tapes even more popular. For example, Masters writes, “The dual-cassette deck allowed people to directly copy one tape to another; eventually this could even be done at high speeds, so it would take less time to dub a tape than to listen to it. This was not only a boon to people who wanted to share albums but also a huge opportunity for self-recorded artists to make copies of their work to sell, allowing them to essentially become their own record labels. Auto-reverse tape decks allowed listeners to avoid taking out a tape and flipping it over. When one side ended, the play head switched direction, so the next side played automatically.”

With the advent of Sony’s Walkman and its accompanying headphones in the 1980s, listeners could carry their favorite music with them and listen to it walking down the street, riding on the subway or bus, or sitting in the library. “The Walkman was revolutionary because it was personal, just like cassette tapes,” Masters explains. “You were no longer bound to what songs came on the radio or an album; whatever you wanted to hear could be put on one small object fixed to your clothes. The Walkman was like a new appendage, and it helped turn music listening from a pastime into an act of self-definition.” Thanks to the Walkman and other players such as the boom box, sales of cassettes outpaced vinyl album sales by 1982: “Cassettes overtook LPs in sales, something the New York Times described as ‘the climax of a Cinderella story in which the lowly triumph against all odds.’”

In the 1960s, fans would often sneak a tape recorder into a concert and make a bootleg recording of the show. With the right equipment, they could make copies of the tape to sell to other fans. By the end of the ’60s, though, tapers with a more archival motivation recorded performances in the interest of capturing the experience of the show. These “‘tape trader’ subcultures,” as Masters calls them, “consisted primarily of megafans who wanted to hear everything by particular artists, rather than opportunists seeking to cash in. They swapped cassettes through the mail or in person at shows and dubbing parties. They prized the documentation and sharing of music over its commodification and looked down on sellers.” Of course, the most famous and influential of these communities grew around the Grateful Dead. The Dead, rather than condemning these communities, encouraged people to tape their concerts and eventually reserved spaces at their shows for tapers.

For fans of cassettes, and those who still fondly recall a well-worn mixtape, High Bias offers a riveting glimpse into the rise, decline, and rebirth of cassettes and their revolutionary role in the history of recording.

Marc Masters’ High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape was published by University of North Carolina Press in October 2023.