Now Available on Cassette—Again: Record Retailer Experiences of Current Cassette Tape Sales

Twenty-five years ago, in November 1976, a physician misunderstood a cassette-tape providing continuing education for family practitioners to say that the rare neurological complication called Guillain-Barré syndrome could be a side effect of flu vaccines. When a recently vaccinated patient developed the syndrome, the physician alerted public officials and thereby started the process that ultimately ended the government campaign to immunize all Americans against swine flu. The physician was right, but for the wrong reasons, as Neustadt and Fineberg point out in the introduction to the 1983 edition of their classic case study of the swine flu episode (1983:xxv).

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Collecting and media change, or: Listening to Phish via app

Convergence The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies ◽

10.1177/1354856519838741 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 26 (4) ◽

pp. 969-989

Author(s):

Scott Kushner

Keyword(s):

Mass Production ◽

Cassette Tape ◽

Message Boards ◽

Recorded Sound ◽

Parallel Motion ◽

Online Message Boards ◽

History Of ◽

Media Change ◽

Relationship Of

Practices of collecting are constrained by media circumstances. To show how changing media circumstances can occasion changes in collecting practices, this article explores one case study, an iOS app developed by a Phish fan to allow streaming audio of fan-made recordings of Phish concert performances. Such practices are part of a history of unofficial music collecting that parallels the history of recorded sound. This case study shows how one collecting community’s practices evolved in the context of changing media conditions: from cassette tape to CD-R to MP3 to streams (and a parallel motion from print to online message boards to app). This progression illustrates the ways that different ways of listening to and accessing recorded music afford different possibilities of collecting music, different links between listener and music, and different relationships among listeners. More precisely, Phish concert recordings, which lent themselves to collection when circulated on cassette, are no longer available to collect when they circulate as streaming media, because streaming is characterized by a relationship of access rather than possession. Among devoted fans, streaming recordings provoke a cultural emphasis on knowledge about music, rather than accumulation of recordings. My argument is rooted in prevailing theories of collecting, which situate collecting as a component of consumer culture emerging from the capitalist expansion stimulated by 19th-century mass production. Ultimately, I argue that when an object of collecting is displaced by changing media conditions, new collecting practices emerge to fill the void.

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Music of Afghanistan: professional musicians in the city of Herat. by John Baily. (Cambridge Studies in Ethnomusicology.) pp. xiv, 183, 16 illus., 3 maps and cassette tape. Cambridge etc., Cambridge University Press, 1988. £32.50.

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland ◽

10.1017/s0035869x0010975x ◽

1989 ◽

Vol 121 (2) ◽

pp. 372-373

Author(s):

Carol Tingey

Keyword(s):

Cassette Tape ◽

Professional Musicians ◽

Cambridge University ◽

The City

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