[tt] NYT: Say So Long to an Old Companion: Cassette Tapes

[Premise Checker]

Say So Long to an Old Companion: Cassette Tapes
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/business/media/28cassette.html

By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN

There was a funeral the other day in the Midtown offices of
Hachette, the book publisher, to mourn the passing of what it called
a "dear friend." Nobody had actually died, except for a piece of
technology, the cassette tape.

While the cassette was dumped long ago by the music industry, it has
lived on among publishers of audio books. Many people prefer
cassettes because they make it easy to pick up in the same place
where the listener left off, or to rewind in case a certain sentence
is missed. For Hachette, however, demand had slowed so much that it
released its last book on cassette in June, with "Sail," a novel by
James Patterson and Howard Roughan.

The funeral at Hachette -- an office party in the audio-book
department -- mirrored the broader demise of cassettes, which gave
vinyl a run for its money before being eclipsed by the compact disc.
(The CD, too, is in rapid decline, thanks to Internet music stores,
but that is a different story.)

Cassettes have limped along for some time, partly because of their
usefulness in recording conversations or making a tape of favorite
songs, say, for a girlfriend. But sales of portable tape players,
which peaked at 18 million in 1994, sank to 480,000 in 2007,
according to the Consumer Electronics Association. The group
predicts that sales will taper to 86,000 in 2012.

"I bet you would be hard pressed to find a household in the U.S.
that doesn't have at least a couple cassette tapes hanging around,"
said Shawn DuBravac, an economist with the Consumer Electronics
Association. Even if publishers of music and audio books stopped
using cassettes entirely, people would still shop for tape players
because of "the huge libraries of legacy content consumers have
kept," he said.

As long as people keep mix tapes from a high-school sweetheart up in
the attic, Mr. DuBravac said, there will still be the urge to hear
them. "People have a tremendous amount of installed content and an
innate curiosity when coming across a box of tapes to say, `Hey,
what's on these?' " he said.

The tapes started to really take off in 1979, the year that a
radical new cassette player -- the Sony Walkman -- was introduced,
enabling people to listen to Donna Summer and the Knack's "My
Sharona" while they were jogging (remember jogging?). The heft of
the early Walkman -- slightly smaller and lighter than a brick -- is
comical by today's wispy iPod standards, but during the Carter
administration it seemed sleek.

Nowadays, listening to music on cassettes is a dying pastime. None
of Billboard's Top 10 albums last week were issued on cassette,
though half were released on vinyl, which has been resurging. Last
year, only 400,000 music tapes were sold, representing one-tenth of
1 percent of all physical and digital music sales, according to the
Recording Industry Association of America. In 1997, the figure was
173 million, and that was when cassettes were already getting a
drubbing by CDs. (The iPod wasn't introduced until 2001.)

"I would not expect to see a revival of cassettes like we've seen in
the LP market," Mr. DuBravac said. While vinyl records have always
been prized artifacts for their devotees, the plastic cassette tape
has little sex appeal.

Such was the case for the eight-track format as well, which was
popular in the late 1960s and '70s. It died relatively quickly with
the advent of cassettes because eight-tracks were not widely used
for personal recording or mix tapes, Mr. DuBravac said.

While the chances of finding cassette players in a dorm room today
are slim, they are still available for sale: on Amazon, Sony alone
offers 23 tape players, from the Walkman to boomboxes.

Popping a cassette in the car tape deck is also passé. Only 4
percent of vehicles sold in the United States during the 2007 model
year had factory-installed cassette players, according to Ward's
Automotive Yearbook. As recently as the 2005 model year, 23 percent
of vehicles had them.

Given that the median age of a car in the United States is nine
years old, said Alan K. Binder, the editor of Ward's yearbook, it is
most likely that the majority of the 200 million cars and light
trucks on America's roads have cassette players (though how many
have had the same Bob Seger tape lodged unplayable in them for 11
years is impossible to determine).

Cassette tapes' tendency to hiss -- and to melt in the summer and
snap in the winter -- turns off audiophiles. But for audio books,
the cassette is an oddly elegant medium: you can eject it from your
car, carry it home and stick it in a boombox, and it will pick up in
the same place, an analog feat beyond the ability of the CD.

Cassettes accounted for 7 percent of all sales in the $923 million
audio-book industry in 2006, the latest year for which data is
available, according to the Audio Publishers Association. While many
publishers, like Random House and Macmillan, stopped producing books
on cassette in the last couple of years, there are holdouts.

At Blackstone Audio, which produces cassette versions of its roughly
340 annual titles, Josh Stanton, the executive vice president, said
there was still demand from libraries and truckers, who buy them at
truck stops. But he could forecast only that his company would
produce cassettes through 2009.

Recorded Books, whose authors include Philip Roth and Jodi Picoult,
still issues cassettes of all its titles, roughly 700 a year.
Retailers like Borders and Barnes & Noble have essentially stopped
ordering them, but libraries have been slower to abandon them, said
Brian Downing, the company's publisher.

The Web sites of Barnes & Noble and Borders, however, indicate that
they still offer some cassettes, though publishers say the stores'
buyers have expressed little interest in ordering more in the
future.

At some point, the cassette will go the way of the eight-track, Mr.
Downing acknowledged, and his company will publish only in other
formats.

"I would guess it would be pretty much gone in three years," he
said.