A short history of the cassette tape

10 October 2026 · 6 min read

The compact cassette was never meant to be a hi-fi format. It started life as a small, simple tape for dictation and home recording, and ended up as the way millions of people bought albums, made mixtapes and carried music around. Here's how a plastic box from the early sixties took over, nearly disappeared, and found its way back.

“Smaller than a pack of cigarettes”

The cassette came from Philips. Lou Ottens, who became head of product development at the company's Hasselt plant in Belgium in 1960, wanted to make tape recording easier and more portable than threading open reels. His team's first hit was a battery-powered portable recorder that still used small reels; a couple of years later they put the tape inside a plastic shell.

Philips showed the new Compact Cassette at the Berlin Radio Show in August 1963, selling it as smaller than a pack of cigarettes. It reached the United States in November 1964 under Philips' Norelco brand.

One format for everyone

The smartest decision came next. Philips licensed the format freely to other manufacturers, and after pressure from Sony agreed to do so free of charge. That meant every maker built tapes and machines to the same size and speed, so any cassette played in any player. A shared standard is a big part of why the cassette outlasted its rivals.

Music arrives on tape

Pre-recorded music cassettes (“Musicassettes”) followed quickly: in Europe in late 1965, in the US in July 1966 when Mercury launched 49 titles, and from British record labels in October 1967. Early tapes were hissy and fairly dull-sounding, fine for speech and pop on a portable player but not much more.

From dictation to hi-fi

Two things changed that in the seventies. New tape coatings such as chromium dioxide (“chrome”) held more treble, and Dolby B noise reduction, which became common by the mid-seventies, cut the background hiss. Together they made the cassette good enough for serious listening at home, and the hi-fi cassette deck became a standard part of a stereo system. (Our guide to tape types explains chrome, metal and the rest, and our Dolby guide covers noise reduction.)

The Walkman

On 1 July 1979 Sony put the TPS-L2 Walkman on sale in Japan, for ¥33,000 (about US$200 when it reached America). It was a tape player small enough to wear, with headphones, and it turned music into something you carried with you. Sony went on to sell hundreds of millions of Walkman players through the eighties and nineties, and every other maker followed with its own personal stereo.

The mixtape years

By 1983 cassettes were outselling vinyl LPs, and they stayed the most popular format for new music in the US and UK until the CD overtook them in 1992. Blank tapes were cheap, so people recorded everything: the radio chart show, a friend's records, and above all mixtapes. The record industry wasn't pleased and campaigned with the slogan “Home Taping Is Killing Music”, but the mixtape became a small art form of its own, with a carefully ordered Side A and Side B and a hand-lettered J-card to go with it. (See J-card design through the decades.)

Fade out…

The CD, then MP3s and streaming, pushed the cassette aside. Pre-recorded tape sales collapsed through the 2000s, and in 2010 Sony announced it would stop making the cassette Walkman. For a while the format survived mainly in car stereos, audiobooks and the bottom of drawers.

…and back again

Then small labels and bands rediscovered it. Tapes are cheap to make in small runs, they're something to hold and collect, and the J-card is a proper canvas for artwork. Cassette Store Day began in the UK on 7 September 2013, and big artists started putting out cassette editions again. In 2025 UK cassette sales reached 164,000, up 53% on the year before, according to the Official Charts Company. The year's best seller was the Better Man soundtrack, with 21,400 tapes sold.

Lou Ottens, who died in 2021 aged 94, was unsentimental about it. He also helped develop the CD, and said that nothing beat it for sound. But the cassette was never really about perfect sound. It was about making your own music, your own way, and handing it to someone.

The cassette in ten dates

1963Philips shows the Compact Cassette at the Berlin Radio Show.
1964The cassette reaches the US under the Norelco brand.
1965–67Pre-recorded Musicassettes arrive in Europe, the US and the UK.
Mid-1970sDolby B and chrome tape make cassettes a hi-fi format.
1979The Sony Walkman goes on sale (1 July, Japan).
1983Cassettes outsell vinyl LPs.
1992The CD overtakes the cassette.
2010Sony announces the end of cassette Walkman production.
2013The first Cassette Store Day (7 September).
2025UK cassette sales reach 164,000, up 53%.

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