Articles


Blank Cassette Tapes As Art

by Menachem Green

In order to compile long lists of songs and capture moments of time blank cassette tapes have been used for a number of years. This can be viewed as an art form of sorts. They are given to people to express their affections or to pass on as music to their friends. This legacy will continue in other circles wherein the tapes are passed from friend to friend as music tastes continue.

In the days before the MP3 and music on demand, I remember waiting for hours for the radio to play my favorite songs. And if I got really lucky, I could start to record them on blank cassette tapes as soon as they started. This procedure required a lot of trial and error and was heavily dependent on luck; if your luck didn't hold, you'd get a lot of commercials and DJ bable instead of your preferred tunes.

The external artistic presentation is as important as the music contained in the audiocassettes for successful marketing of the cassettes. People show their artistic abilities in designing even the blank cassette labels. These are artistically decorated with markers and stickers. Such decorations are an art form itself. People also give creative names for this and decorate it suitably to gift it.

Audio recording technology has cntinued to advance along with the rest of society. Audio cassette tapes have been replaced by CDs and Audio DVDs. Recording has been improved with the new system of digital audio tape. Mixes have gotten steadily easier with the MP3 format. Now, you can download any song for your computer, burn it onto a compact disc in minutes, and even produce a customized CD label for your very own. Amazing, isn't it?

There are still those who swear by good old blank cassette tapes. There are even online communities where people sign up to swap their own cassette mixes with others in an attempt to expend one's music knowledge. Those can be a lot of fun and very amusing. People are exposed to such different music as they go through their lives all over the country and the world.

Wherever technology will take us, we'll never forget the cassette tapes and the mark they left in our society. It converted all of us into music mixers and permitted creativity to flow. And we continued this into the new CD and mp3 world, but it's not such fun any more as with those tape mixes.

Blank cassette tapes can be artistic. For years they were used to record special moments and compilations of songs. They were given as gifts and used to share music with friends. Blank cassette labels were artistically decorated and given a name to describe the music it contained. Now we have DVDs and CDs which provide better recording quality. There is also a digital audio tape for better quality, and mp3s which enable you to find and download songs from the Internet onto a CD. Online groups exist for buyers, sellers, and traders. But we will remember the blank cassette tape forever as it let our creativity flow.

Published August 9th, 2007

Filed in Hobby