BA HISTORY 101: Cassette mix tapes
Cassette mix tapes are a thing of the past thanks to the internet, but there was a time when a special mix tape meant the world to high school students.
Music today is easier to come by then ever.
Now we have music on our phones that allow us to listen to some of our favorites.
We have music from all over the world due to: Spotify, Soundcloud, Apple Music, Pandora, YouTube, Imusic, Itunes, Amazon music and Musi.
If you want a variety or just your favorite music create a playlist.
It wasn’t that easy in the 80s and 90s.
In those decades CD’s and cassette tapes were the new trend. If you wanted have a tape with all of your favorite music for driving in the car or setting the mood, it was a long process of dubbing music from a master tape to a blank cassette. It took a while, but the wait also made the finished product even sweeter.
32 years ago THE HYLITE (the Bellwood-Antis school newspaper) Steph Weber wrote about the problems of cassettes and the frustrating hours of trying to make your own personalized tape. She was quite familiar with the disappointment of buying an album and having to fast forward or rewind through it to find one favorite song.
“Personics is a great solution to the problem of having to purchase an album of only one song. It is a good way to purchase a tape off those one-hit wonders,” Weber wrote.
Personics was a company that took dubbing to a new level. According to the Personics Wikipedia listing: “The system allowed customers to enter a music store, use headphones to preview and select individual songs on a console, then specify a custom list of songs to be recorded to a Compact Cassette tape.”
Nowadays it’s so much different. Music is easy to come by and creating personalized music soundtracks is as easy as clicking a mouse or tapping an item with a finger.
