Words and Illustration by B. E. Sabin | July 25, 2024
Part Two: You Are, Luckily, Not Yet a Robot
If your goal in life is to become a robot then stop reading. What follows doesn’t concern you. Keep playing with your phone, listening to your digital music, and using artificial intelligence (AI) to do your work for you. Right now, yes, AI is a helpful tool, but watch out because soon it will be telling you to stay home from work because it can do your job better than you, which, you know what, it probably can do your job more efficiently than you. AI will make fewer mistakes, won’t be late to work, and will never talk back to their boss because they had a road rage incident on their commute and spilled half a cup of coffee in their lap. AI has fewer imperfections than humans, so, of course, they will be better workers.
And that brings us back to the cassette tape.
The Cassette Tape: A Useful Tool
The cassette tape, who you met earlier, like AI, is a useful tool, but it won't steal your job. Although, the cassette was more useful before the advent of digital music. The CD, aka the cassette tape killer, was released to the public in 1982 and in the 1990s put the cassette tape out of the limelight.
Even though the CD was available to the public during the 80s, which was the heyday of the cassette tape, people chose the cassette for two reasons. One was because it was portable. Cassettes fit nicely in a pocket. Vinyl records do not. CDs do not. Moreover, this portability was made extremely desirable with the advent of the Sony Walkman in 1979. The Walkman allowed people to listen to cassettes on the go while not just in their car (the car cassette player was introduced in 1968).
While the CD Discman was introduced a few years later in 1984 (along with the car CD player), the cassette tape was still the consumer's choice because CDs were far from being in-home recordable (burnable). And they were apt to skip (CD skip protection was still a long way off) when not stationary, which is hard to avoid when walking or driving.
Another thing that made the cassette tape the 1980s music king was the ability to record music. People would record their vinyl records, music off of the radio, their band demos, or make the ever-popular mixtape, which is the 1980s equivalent of a playlist. And get this, people did all of this without somebody tracking their interests and online activity for advertising purposes.
Crazy, right?
You have chosen wisely and survived the digital nightmare. But how do you stay in the land of analog bliss? Stay tuned for part 3 when our hero, you, becomes a master of analog musical consumption.
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