Now we have to make a little detour here from the topic of the multitrack tape recorders, because historically, another important magnetic tape format appears on the consumer music market at this time, and significantly impacts its landscape, and the consumers’ way of interacting with music for decades to come. The cassette tape, and the cassette tape player, were developed by a Dutch electronics company Philips, and introduced as a format in 1963. Originally, the cassette tape format was not intended or marketed for music applications, but for speech recording and dictation, so its audio quality remained relatively low for several years. By 1965, Philips shared this new format, first with Sony, and then with all the manufactures, license free. As more and more manufacturers worked on it, and began to modify it, its audio specifications started to improve and come closer to the quality needed for music applications. At the same time, in 1964, the most unlikely company made its debut in the music industry – the Learjet Corporation. As in Learjet aircraft Learjet? Yes. I know. You can’t make this stuff up. And you know that there must be a story behind it. And you are right, there is. Long in short of it is, that Mr. William Lear, before building his aircraft company, had a company called Lear Radio, in the 1940s, that manufactured magnetic wire recorders, that we talked about earlier. So he was versed in audio electronics. After he founded the Learjet Company, one of the early cartridge tape formats that briefly appeared on the market in the early 60s, came to his attention, and he acquired a license for it. He though it would make for a good background music player for his aircrafts. He redesigned the whole thing, and came up with a cartridge holding a reel of a ¼ inch tape, that had 8 parallel audio tracks. Since it was a stereo format, meaning that there are two tracks, left and right, for each music program, it could hold 4 parallel music programs on it. The tape head was thus designed as a 4-stereo-tracks head, and each of the 4 stereo tracks could be chosen by the user for playback. Lear called it Stereo 8. Being an entrepreneur at heart, Lear thought that if perhaps other companies liked his new tape format and player, there might be some profits in it too. So he sent demo versions out to a number of businesses, including the car companies. And lo and behold, Ford loved it. Lear made a deal with RCA Victor to start releasing music in the Stereo 8 format, and made a deal with Motorola to manufacture it, and Ford offered the player as an option in some of their 1965 models, and in all of their 1966 models. It came to be known as the “8 track”. Within a few years, 8 tracks became so popular, that by 1968 both Chrysler and GM started offering it in their models. By the early 70s, it was a standard feature across the car industry. Plus, the home versions of 8 track players entered the market as well, and now the consumers could listen to the same tapes at home and in their cars. The format’s popularity grew to the point where by the mid 1970s, 8 tracks represented a third of the recorded music sales. By that time, the cassette tape technology has made great strides and became not only well capable and known audio format, but it became apparent that it had some strong advantages over 8 track. First, unlike 8 track, it was designed and offered from the very beginning as a recording and playing device, not as a primarily playing device. So copying an LP album onto a cassette, not onto an 8 track, became the thing to do. Also, the record labels started to release albums in the cassette tape format too, so the lack of an available repertoire was less and less of a problem. Plus, it was smaller, more compact than the 8 track format. By 1979, the cassette has captured 50 percent of the 8 track’s market. And then, in July 1979, Sony introduced the first truly portable cassette tape player, the Sony Walkman. It weighed 15 ounces, ran on two double A batteries, could fit on a belt, and came with a small headphone set. It was an epitome of cool, and it became a must-have device. And it spelled death for 8 tracks. By 1982, most of the labels stopped releasing music in the 8 track format, and by the following year, cassettes outsell even LPs, and became the dominant format in the music market. From this point on, cassettes will share the market stage with LPs for another 15 years or so. They would both be eventually brought down by another newcomer from the Philips and Sony laboratories. But that’s the story for another module.
