The compact cassette, introduced by Philips in 1963 and first marketed for recording speech, became by the late 1970s the cheapest way to record, copy and share music. Cassette culture is the name for the amateur scene that grew around it: musicians recorded at home on four-track machines from Tascam and Fostex, dubbed their own tapes and spread them through the post, tape trading, photocopied catalogues and fanzines, often in exchange for a blank tape and a stamped addressed envelope.
The scene peaked in Britain in the post-punk years around 1978 to 1984 and continued in the United States into the 1990s, with small bedroom labels in many countries. Much of the music was lo-fi by necessity, and the same years made the personal mixtape a cultural ritual; hip hop’s beat tapes belong to the same habit of passing music hand to hand. Cassettes have enjoyed a modest revival since the 2000s, and tape hiss and wobble are now sounds that lo-fi producers recreate on purpose.