R.I.P Lou Ottens.

 

Any music fan who grew up between the mid-seventies and the mid-nineties, every amateur band who ever made a demo or rehearsal, anyone who sat in front of the stereo taping the UK Top 40 singles chart on a Sunday evening, or made a mixtape for a love interest or a friend. Anyone who owned a Walkman. They all owe it to the man in the photo. The man who invented the compact cassette, and changed the way music was not only listened to but the way it was shared. Lou Ottens, who passed away aged 94, was a Dutch engineer who was working as head of development for Philips when, irritated by the cumbersome and expensive reel-to-reel tape technology of the day, he began creating a smaller, recordable cassette that would fit in a jacket pocket. Unveiling his invention at the 1963 Berlin electronics fair, he changed the world. In-car cassette players, mixtapes, the concept of the playlist, boomboxes, and the first personal music player - the Walkman - all came as a result of his genius. Various musical genres and scenes had the humble cassette at their heart: Eighties indie and alternative music, US hardcore punk, Hip-hop, acid house and rave music (remember those tape packs of all night raves like Fantasia?) There were independent labels who only released music on cassette, as a cheaper way of circumventing the major labels and the expense of pressing vinyl: fans of the music would often trade tapes with one another. Cassettes were also hugely popular in countries where western music was banned or unavailable commercially, albeit as pirated copies.

Pre-recorded cassette sales overtook those of vinyl, until the mid-nineties when the falling price in CDs and their players became more affordable to the wider public. They slowly disappeared from stores, although blank cassettes were still available in smaller quantities. After the ill-fated MiniDisc, a recordable format with CD quality, downloadable music files became the dominant way of consuming music, mp3 players rendering even blank CD's irrelevant. The cassette was considered a long-dead format by the late 2000's: Sony stopped producing the iconic Walkman in 2010. But...... after the unexpected revival of Vinyl in the early-to-mid 2010's, cassettes began to make a similar revival: not in the huge numbers that vinyl was selling in, but enough for a Cassette Store Day to be founded. Quite a few high profile musicians began releasing new albums on the format, in addition to the scores of independent, cult artists. Sales in 2020 topped 65,000 just in the UK. This often maligned format - i'm sure most of us remember the annoyance of winding unspooled tape back in with a pencil, or the horror of untangling chewed up or snapped tape - still has it's fans, it seems. Lou Ottens wasn't convinced by the revival of these classic formats, though: he recently remarked that he considered the CD, which he had a hand in inventing, had the better sound quality, but that "people will hear what they want to hear". And the people still want to hear his most iconic invention, nearly sixty years on.