Philips gave the cassette away, and that is how it conquered the world
When Philips unveiled its Compact Cassette in Berlin in August 1963, rival formats were vying to become the standard. Under pressure from Sony, Philips licensed its design free of charge, and the gamble paid off. Grundig's competing cassette vanished within two years, and Philips' little box became the tape everyone knew.
The design came from a team in Hasselt, Belgium, led by Lou Ottens, which beat a rival single-hole cassette developed by Philips' Vienna factory with Grundig. It was meant for dictation, and early players sounded too poor for serious music. That changed in the 1970s. In 1971 the Advent Model 201 deck combined Dolby B noise reduction with chromium dioxide tape, and as Dolby spread through the decade and cut the hiss, the format became respectable for high fidelity. Recorder sales passed 2.4 million by 1968, spread across 85 makers.
The Sony Walkman made it personal. Once shops began selling the first model, the TPS-L2, on 1 July 1979, people could listen to music anywhere and privately, something no vinyl record allowed. Walkman sales reached up to 350 million units, and the name became so generic that Austria's Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that Sony could not stop rivals using it. From 1983 to 1991 cassettes were the top-selling format for new music in the United States. One obstacle was shoplifting: tapes slipped easily into pockets, so American shops locked them in cases or bulky boxes that discouraged browsing.
Cheap copying gave cassettes political weight. Smuggled punk and rock tapes crossed the Iron Curtain, and before the 1979 Iranian Revolution, recorded sermons of the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini circulated across Iran. In Chile under military rule, a cassette culture shared blacklisted music. In India, tapes created a booming pop market, legitimate and pirated alike, while Spanish filling stations stocked racks of rumba and joke tapes.
Physically, the shell measures about 4 by 2.5 by 0.5 inches, and the so-called eighth-inch tape is actually slightly wider, at 0.15 inches. CDs overtook cassettes in most markets, though tapes remained the main way to buy music in some developing countries until around 2005.
Source: Cassette tape
