A Digital Archive Features Hundreds of Audio Cassette Tape Designs, from the 1960s to the 1990s

Audio cas­sette tapes first appeared on the mar­ket in the ear­ly nine­teen-six­ties, but it would take about a decade before they came to dom­i­nate it. And when they did, they’d changed the lives of many a music-lover by hav­ing made it pos­si­ble not just to lis­ten to their albums of choice on the go, but also to col­lect and trade their own cus­tom-assem­bled lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ences. By the eight­ies, blank tapes had become a house­hold neces­si­ty on the order of bat­ter­ies or toi­let paper for such con­sumers — and just as with those fre­quent­ly replen­ished prod­ucts, every­one seemed to have their favorite brand.

Some pre­ferred tapes from Philips, which devel­oped the for­mat of the Com­pact Cas­sette in the first place. Oth­ers had their pick from Fuji, BASF, Sony, Radio Shack, Scotch (which also made tape of the sticky vari­ety), and a host of oth­er brands besides.

Even some mem­bers of post-cas­sette gen­er­a­tions rec­og­nize the old tagline “Is it live or is it Mem­o­rex?” or Max­el­l’s “Blown Away Guy” in his scarf and LC2. If you’re old enough to have done tap­ing of your own, you don’t need a logo to rec­og­nize your brand; you’ll know it as soon as you spot the design of the cas­sette itself in the online archive at tapedeck.org.

“I built tapedeck.org to show­case the amaz­ing beau­ty and (some­times) weird­ness found in the designs of the com­mon audio tape cas­sette,” writes the site’s cre­ator Oliv­er Gel­brich. “There’s an amaz­ing range of designs, start­ing from the ear­ly 60’s func­tion­al cas­sette designs, mov­ing through the col­or­ful play­ful­ness of the 70’s audio tapes to amaz­ing shape vari­a­tions dur­ing the 80s and 90s.” You can browse the ever-expand­ing col­lec­tion by brand, run­ning time, col­or, and even tape coat­ing: chrome, fer­ro, fer­rochrome, and met­al, by whose dif­fer­ences audio­philes set great store.

Some­what improb­a­bly, in this age where even home CD-burn­ing has been dis­placed by near-instan­ta­neous stream­ing and down­load­ing of dig­i­tal music, the cas­sette tape has made some­thing of a come­back. The near-mytho­log­i­cal allure of the mix­tape has only grown in recent years, dur­ing which artists both minor and major have put out cas­sette releas­es — and in some cas­es, cas­sette-only releas­es. This seems to be hap­pen­ing around the world: a few weeks ago, while strolling an art-school neigh­bor­hood in Seoul, where I live, I passed a cof­fee shop that offered its young cus­tomers rentals of both tapes and Walk­man-style play­ers on which to lis­ten to them. As anoth­er gen­er­a­tion-tran­scend­ing slo­gan has it, every­thing old is new again.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed con­tent:

Home Tap­ing Is Killing Music: When the Music Indus­try Waged War on the Cas­sette Tape Dur­ing the 1980s, and Punk Bands Fought Back

Lis­ten to Audio Arts: The 1970s Tape Cas­sette Arts Mag­a­zine Fea­tur­ing Andy Warhol, Mar­cel Duchamp & Many Oth­ers

The Beau­ty of Degrad­ed Art: Why We Like Scratchy Vinyl, Grainy Film, Wob­bly VHS & Oth­er Ana­log-Media Imper­fec­tion

Atten­tion K‑Mart Shop­pers: Hear 90 Hours of Back­ground Music & Ads from the Retail Giant’s 1980s and 90s Hey­day

A Free Dig­i­tal Archive of Graph­ic Design: A Curat­ed Col­lec­tion of Design Trea­sures from the Inter­net Archive

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.