The final end of the cassette tape…
By Harry Wallop, Consumer Affairs Correspondent
The eject button on music tapes has been pressed for the last time.
Currys, the biggest electronics retailer in Britain, will today announce that it is to stop selling cassette tapes - a move which sounds the death knell for the compilation tape, used by a generation of love-struck young men to woo their girlfriends.
The High Street chain also predicts that this Christmas will be the last time it sells any hi-fi system with a tape deck included.
Cassette tapes have been suffering a slow decline over the past 15 years as first compact discs, and more recently music downloading, took hold. But it is estimated that there are still as many as 500 million tapes in circulation, languishing at the back of bookshelves, or in the side doors of cars.
“I remember the tape with some fondness,” said Peter Keenan, the managing director of Currys. “The hours spent putting together compilation tapes and the all-too-familiar experience of finding your deck had chewed your tape, will resonate with many now in their 30s and 40s.”
In the days before downloads or CDs, creating a compilation tape - or mix tape - was, for many young men, a key part of any romance. The practice was memorably captured by Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, which laid out the rules to the perfect compilation.
Rob Sheffield, a writer for the magazine Rolling Stone, last month published Love is a Mix Tape, a eulogy to his wife who died from cancer, interspersed with details from the compilation tapes they created.
The MP3 player has made the practice almost redundant. The sales of cassettes have fallen steadily since they hit their peak in the 1980s - a decade when they enjoyed unparalleled popularity, helped by the rise of the Walkman, launched by Sony in 1979.
The portability of the format moved out of the living room and on to the street. In 1989, helped by falling prices of hi-fi systems, 83 million music cassettes were sold in the UK. This fell to 53 million in 2000, and just half a million in 2005, according to Understanding & Solutions, a market research firm.
Last year only about 100,000 of the items were sold. However, this figure excludes audio books and blank tapes, which still attract a small, loyal fan base, with four million blank tapes sold last year and 1.5 million audio books.
Jason Toal, of Simon Fraser University in California, has studied what he dubs “cassette culture” and claims there are many advantages that tapes, which were launched by Philips in 1963, enjoy over downloading music.
“With digital we get the benefit of access to as much music as we want,” he said. “But that comes with a loss of privacy. As you download, someone is watching you all the time. Cassettes are off the network.”
Currys is the last High Street chain to bow out of the market. Woolworths has thrown in the towel and HMV stopped stocking the products 18 months ago. Currys still sells a handful of hi-fi systems that include tape players, but will phase them out during the year.
Mr Keenan said: “In a sense this decision reflects the beginning of the end for mechanical audio products.”