El Casete

Milestones of the format

• · August 28, 1963 — Philips presents the compact cassette at the Berlin Radio Show, developed by Lou Ottens's team, alongside the portable EL 3300 recorder.
• · The 60s–70s — Philips licenses the system free of charge and the cassette establishes itself as the world standard of home recording: the era of home taping and of the tape made at home is born.
• · July 1, 1979 — Sony launches the Walkman TPS-L2 in Japan, the first low-cost personal stereo (some 33,000 yen): Sony projected 5,000 units a month and sold more than 30,000 in the first two months. Music becomes individual and mobile.
• · The 80s — the cassette lives its golden decade as the format of the street, of the car and of trading mixes, coexisting with vinyl in the booth and at home.

The tape in the Venezuelan miniteca

In miniteca culture the cassette was, above all, the medium of the jingles — the sonic identity of every crew. The Archive documents it with the precision of an inventory: Fahrenheit fired its jingles from a Nakamichi deck, recorded on Sonotek, Magnum and TDK tapes, where the voices of Hoffman, Carlos Eduardo Ball, Jesús Leandro and Iván Loscher could be heard. And the memory of the movement was kept in that same plastic: “in the jingles kept on TDK cassettes: ¡Sube Betelgeuse! ¡Vamos Infierno! ¡Dale ZC!”

The tape was also currency and seed of the movement. ZC — one of the legendary minitecas of Caracas — was born out of an AIWA combo with a digital double cassette, and its founder financed the first equipment “with savings and the resale of tapes”: the recordings circulated, were collected and were sold. And more than one discjockey (now DJ) came up with the tape in his hand — Oscar Leal, a future great of the trade, started at 16 years old providing the music for school parties with vinyl records and cassettes.

Legacy

The cassette lost the commercial battle to the CD in the nineties, but it left two enormous legacies: the culture of the recorded mix — the mixtape, direct ancestor of the discjockey set that circulates today in digital form — and the personal listening the Walkman inaugurated, without which neither the MP3 player nor the phone with headphones would exist. In the CMTK Archive, the jingle tapes are among the most sought-after pieces: in them the voice of the golden era literally survives.

Note on scope

The general history of the format comes from verified external sources (Philips, technical press, encyclopedias). The Venezuelan angle is limited to what is already documented in the Archive — Fahrenheit's jingles on Sonotek, Magnum and TDK tapes, ZC's AIWA combo and resale of tapes, the TDK cassettes of miniteca memory —, without adding new local episodes.

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Credits and sources

• · Miniteca angle (jingles fired from a Nakamichi deck on Sonotek, Magnum and TDK tapes with the voices of Hoffman, Carlos Eduardo Ball, Jesús Leandro and Iván Loscher; the AIWA double-cassette combo and the resale of tapes in the origins of ZC; Oscar Leal's beginnings with vinyl records and cassettes; “jingles kept on TDK cassettes”): “La Revista de las Minitecas” (DJ Vladimir Medina edition), accounts gathered in the entries of the CMTK Archive (Fahrenheit, ZC, Oscar Leal) and in “Evolución de una Cultura”.
• · Presentation of the compact cassette (Philips, Berlin Radio Show, August 28, 1963; Lou Ottens; EL 3300 recorder; free licensing): Wikipedia (EN), “Cassette tape” and “Lou Ottens”; Philips Museum; The Register (“Are you for reel? 50 years of the Compact Cassette”).
• · Sony Walkman TPS-L2 (July 1, 1979, Japan; ¥33,000; more than 30,000 units in two months): Wikipedia (EN), “Walkman”; Walkman Archive; Smithsonian – National Museum of American History; Sound & Vision.