KEY POINTS:
LOL, BBF, OMFG: You should know what they mean before you're even done reading them. They're the acronyms of our time.
But how about TEAC, BASF and TDK? Any bells ringing now? Maybe there's a distant tinkling, but I'd put good money on there being at least
one small object bearing those initials lying disconsolately in a dark place in your home; a place you'll never return to unless you eventually move.
It might even have a message scribbled on the sticker you or a former infatuation crookedly put on it to remind you of the contents or the good times. The chances are it's a mixtape.
Once tokens of affection and obsession, mixtapes are now regular residents in the nooks that used to be home only to bent coathangers. Woe is them.
Even so, there was a time during the 80s and 90s when the sun shone brightly on cassettes. In 1990, sales of pre-recorded and blank tapes in this country were worth $52 million a year compared with $10 million for records and $26 million for the newish upstart CDs. Clunky walkmans were flapping from as many hips as now carry iPods and there would have been a buggered tape jamming at least one car stereo in any queue of traffic you chose to point at.
In these parts cassettes even had their own theme song - "Dear John, how I hate to write ..." - which was kind of odd given the words came from a recorded message, but never mind, we all knew what the television ad was about. The company it was touting doesn't even make tapes any more, so don't expect any nostalgic rescreening unless you look it up yourself on YouTube. Because we have arrived at an historic time, we are on the cusp of marking the first passing of a fully-global music format.
Well, when I say cusp, tape still rules in places like India, but for the sake of argument ... By 2001, total cassette sales in New Zealand had slumped to less than $10 million despite an overall increase in music-related spending. The picture is even worse in the United States where sales dropped from US$442 million ($646 million) in 1990 to a piddling US$700,000 in 2006, although one entrepreneurial American has told the New York Times that he's making a fine living off cassettes after buying up an unwanted stockpile to flog them off to prisoners denied internet access.
So, does this matter? It's hard to explain why it does if you've been seduced into the click and drag world of MP3 downloads but there was a romantic inconvenience to hissy tapes, they deserve some form of fond requiem. Sure, they could be frustratingly inexact tools and required some practice to master; maintaining sound levels was tricky, but not as tricky as estimating the final moment you could push record before the record started playing. If you were recording off the radio you only got one shot at avoiding recording the DJ babble or ads that bookended the songs you wanted, and then there was the stress of whether or not the last song would fit on the tape before it reached the end of the spool.
Hairpulling stuff, and that's without entering into the murky world of bootlegging live gigs. Then even if the final product was perfect, it could end up an twisted, unplayable mess if left on the car dashboard during a hot day, transformed into alien wailings if placed too close to a magnet, or wiped altogether if you forgot to pop the locking tabs on top of the tape and accidentally pushed the wrong button. But it was still worth it. For tongue-tied teens who didn't know how to say it with flowers, slaving over and then gifting a mixtape was a very big deal - those weren't just random songs, they were expressions of your soul in two carefully calculated 45-minute bursts.
Albums were one thing, but this was the first opportunity to create your own playlist. Bedroom DJs operated by their own rules but ideally they started with a ripper while saving the showstopper for track three to entrench listener attention. And you never featured the same artist twice on the same side.
Inevitably all the fun and games were greeted with high-pitched squealing from music execs moaning that home-taping was killing music - damn fools didn't know how good they had it. Ironically, some labels are now distributing their pre-release review copies on cassette because it makes them slightly harder to duplicate digitally. Does that mean there's any chance of a vinyl-esque revival?
Will the cool kids decide to get all High Fidelity and start creating their own analog compilations in some spirit of nostalgic angst?
Well, there does seem to be an oddly lucrative online trade in sealed, vintage tapes, but they're a diminishing resource. Apart from talking books and religious readings - which are already moving onto CD - the collapsing market is pushing the biggest manufacturers into new ventures. "I think they'll die out soon," says Dave Ritchie from Monaco Group, the company that took over the TDK brand. "We still sell between 350,000 and 400,000 tapes a year, but back in the heyday, the mid-90s, it would have been millions.
Everything is changing and a lot of the companies have just stopped producing them. We've already stopped making the high-position tapes, what people used to call 'chrome' tapes." And there's an unloved tape mountain lurking somewhere in Hastings. "You'd be welcome to about 100,000 tapes here if you're interested," says Adam Turner at TEAC importer Direct Imports. "Bloody CDs. Tapes outsold them 10-to-one for a while there, but that trend has stopped dead now."
Still, all is not lost. Even if no one's making tape decks and tapes, the online greenies have come up with ingenious methods of reintegrating cassettes into society. Find the right sites and you can learn, step by step, how to transform your last cassette into a handy case for your iPod, or even a wallet, belt buckle, lamp, or an, ummm, fetching necklace (remember they are hippies).
Artist Brian Dettmer has even constructed a skull from melted heavy metal tapes. This year marks the 45th anniversary of the first cassette being ejected from its player at the Philips plant in the Netherlands and surely that's far too young for a death sentence. Someone, press rewind so we can start all over again.
