The cassette tape was a revolutionary invention when it first came into being in the early 1960s. For the first time ever, music became portable.
Tapes were lightweight and could be easily carried around for people to share, or to play in their car radios and eventually on their Walkmans.
The mixtape originated during this era, and millions of people around the globe recorded their favorite tracks onto empty tapes to share with friends or potential love interests. Music lovers everywhere flourished in the age of the cassette tape. So much nostalgia surrounds this invention.
If you had to guess, how many cassette tapes do you think have been produced since their invention in the 1960s?
We’ll give you the answer.
Since the 1960s, nearly 30 billion cassette tapes have been made. Can you believe how high that number is? If all the cassette tape shells in the world were placed end to end, they could stretch from the earth to the moon and back four times. That’s a whole lot of cassette tapes! Who would’ve thought that so many tapes existed? We could never have guessed. So who manufactured all of these cassette tapes? Sony, Phillips, and TDK were just a few of the biggest manufacturers of cassette tapes back in the day. Today, the National Audio Company based in Missouri is the largest cassette tape manufacturer in the U.S., and they are still going strong.
Since 2016, cassette tapes have seen a moderate resurgence. In 2016, cassette sales rose by 74%. So even in the digital age, tape sales are increasing! It’s great that such an iconic medium of entertainment is still sticking around. Who knows, maybe they’ll come back to the mainstream?
If you have old cassette tapes lying around and would like to be able to listen to them on your phone or computer, consider getting them digitized with Legacybox. Through digitization, you can have easy access to your sound files through all of your devices. You can quickly share them with friends and family and listen to them on the go with your phone. The best way to preserve all forms of analog media is through digitization. By making digital copies of analog media, you never have to worry about losing tapes again.