MusicTech Rewinder - Issue #48

Happy Friday,

this week, LOU OTTENS, the man who invented putting music in your pocket died at age 94.

He developed the cassette tape and the first portable tape recorder because he thought tape machines should be easier to use than reel-to-reel recorders. And they should be portable. The tapes themselves, Ottens believed, should fit in a pocket. Marc Masters, who's writing a book about the history of cassettes, shared an anecdote on Twitter about how Ottens' original design was for a tool to record interviews and nature sounds, not music.

I grew up with cassettes as the main medium for music and I am still a big fan of it. For me personally, this was the best format for music ever invented. I love the limitation, the sound of music on cassettes(I know, the quality is far from everything that came afterward - CDs, mp3, etc), the haptic feeling, and most of all the possibilities to be creative with this format (putting together mixtapes, designing them, etc.).

Cassettes also democratized music distribution for the first time on a large scale and who knows if Hip Hop would be as big as it is today without the invention of cassettes and mixtapes.

I still believe (and hope) that cassettes will have come back one day. In the meantime, here is a documentary about the history of cassettes.

Lou Ottens was one of the greatest inventors in music tech of all time and he never stopped innovating. In the early '80s, when he was still at Philips, he was also on the team that invented the CD.

RIP to a legend.

Besides that sad news, a lot of other developments happened in music tech this week.

Enjoy reading and have a wonderful weekend.

Cheers,

Matt

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