Goodbye to (Real) Mix Tapes
It was inevitable.
In June, Hachette, a large U.S. trade publisher, released its last audiobook cassette. Now The New York Times has posted an obituary of sorts bemoaning the death of the cassette tape.
From the article:
"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."
Quite a sad day indeed. Scoring teenage angst will never be the same again.
