Cassette

 A cassette, formally known as the Compact Cassette, is an analogue magnetic-tape format for recording and playing sound. Its tape and two reels are enclosed in a small plastic shell.

The tape runs from one reel to the other while a cassette recorder or player reads the magnetic information and turns it into sound. Compact Cassette tape is 3.81 millimetres (0.15 inches) wide and normally travels at 4.76 centimetres (1â…ž inches) per second.

A cassette normally has two sides, A and B. People could record music onto a blank cassette, buy a prerecorded album, or make a mixtape by copying each song from the radio or other records.

In 1958, after four years of development, RCA Victor introduced its reversible Sound Tape Cartridge. It enclosed quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape in a convenient cartridge, but players were slow to reach the market, few prerecorded titles appeared and the format disappeared from shops by 1964.

Dutch engineer Lou Ottens (June 21, 1926–March 6, 2021) led the Philips team that developed the Compact Cassette. Frustrated by bulky reel-to-reel machines, he wanted a recorder that was small enough to fit into a coat pocket.

Philips first presented the Compact Cassette and its EL 3300 recorder at the International Radio Exhibition in Berlin on August 28, 1963. The system had originally been intended mainly for speech and dictation rather than high-fidelity music.

The format reached the United States in November 1964, where the recorder was sold under the Norelco name as the Carry-Corder 150. More than 250,000 Compact Cassette recorders had been sold in the country by 1966.

Philips allowed other manufacturers to use the Compact Cassette system without paying a licence fee, provided that they followed its technical specifications. This helped establish one compatible worldwide standard.

Philips and PolyGram launched prerecorded "Musicassette" in March 1965. In 1966 the company put a cassette recorder into a portable radio, and the following year it introduced a car radio with a built-in cassette recorder.

A Philips EL 3302 portable cassette recorder (1968). Photograph by mib18 at German Wikipedia.

Dolby B noise reduction and chromium-dioxide tape greatly improved cassette sound during the 1970s. The Advent Model 201, introduced in 1971, combined both technologies and helped make the cassette a credible high-fidelity format.

Sony launched its first Walkman, the blue-and-silver TPS-L2, in Japan on July 1, 1979. The portable stereo player had two headphone sockets and helped turn the cassette into a mass-market personal listening format.

Philips later estimated that more than 100 billion cassette tapes were sold worldwide.

In the United States, cassette sales by value overtook LP sales in 1983. Research published in December 1986 found that prerecorded cassettes had outsold LPs by more than two to one in 1985, with sales of $1.17 billion compared with $519.5 million for LPs.

UK cassette-album sales peaked at 83 million in 1989. The rise of the compact disc and later digital formats caused a steep decline, and only about 900,000 cassette albums were sold in the UK in 2004.

The 2010 Lexus SC 430 is generally cited as the last new US-market car supplied with a cassette player as standard. Mercury continued to offer one as an option in the Grand Marquis until production ended in January 2011.

The 2011 print edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary dropped the term "cassette tape." It was the concise dictionary, not the full Oxford English Dictionary, that removed the entry.

In 2014 Sony demonstrated experimental magnetic-tape technology capable of storing more than 185 terabytes of computer data per cartridge. Despite some reports describing it as a cassette tape, it was high-density data-storage technology rather than a consumer audio cassette.

The cassette later enjoyed a small revival. United Kingdom sales rose by 53.8 per cent to 164,491 units in 2025, although the format remained a niche part of the recorded-music market.

Sources: Philips Museum: Soundtrack to People's Lives; Royal Philips: First Philips Cassette Recorder; Royal Philips: Lou Ottens; Sony: Walkman 20th Anniversary; Billboard, December 13, 1986; BBC News: Not Long Left for Cassette Tapes; BBC News: Why Police Still Used Cassettes; Sony: 185TB Magnetic-Tape Technology; Hagerty: The Last In-Car Cassette Decks; BBC News: UK Music Sales in 2025.