Making Media Personal: Mix Tapes

recorded two weeks ago. So in our last episode, which was ages ago for me, I teased a bit about the emergence of the audio cassette tape, and I think you could argue that the cassette split the path of audio consumption into two sort of broad philosophies. On one side, you have the audiophile dream of a format and a system capable of producing sound from a recording that would

be indistinguishable from the original performance. So would be as if you, the listener, were actually in the recording studio when the tracks were first laid down, or at the very least, that you would be hearing the sound that the producers intended for you to hear, because if they put a lot of effects on it or anything like that in post production, then obviously you're not going to hear exactly the thing that was performed when it was being recorded. But you get my point. The other philosophy

would sacrifice some quality in return for added convenience. So these this isn't just one format, but sort of a group of formats that are not the highest in audio quality compared to things like vinyl albums, for example. These formats can't provide the fidelity of the ones that are beloved by audio files, but they do allow for more versatile listening experiences, such as portable devices capable of playing

back audio. These two philosophies would continue on from the nineteen sixties through to today, and they have an impact on the actual practices of audio recording. But we'll get into all of that in this and future episodes. So first,

let's talk about magnetic tape. I mentioned it a bit in the previous episode, like when I talked about recording multiple tracks to the same tape, making it possible for a single musician to accompany him or herself on different instruments or even the same instrument, playing different parts of a song. With enough tracks and a versatile enough musician, you could have one person play virtually all the instruments and provide lead and backing vocals on a single piece

of music. So, for example, this isn't a song, but a piece of music. In the piece tubular Bells, which was made famous in The Exorcist, Mike Oldfield played acoustic guitar, bass guitar, electric guitar, three different kinds of organs, fuzz guitars, glockenspiel, mandolin, and piano, and timpani. Oh, and also the tubular bells,

plus some other stuff. And obviously he wasn't playing all of that simultaneously during the recording session, he was able to lay that down track by track into a full piece. So let's talk a bit about the tech of magnetic tape and how all of this is possible. So this is gonna mean backtracking again through our history, but I feel like this is easier to understand if we tackle each topic individually, as opposed to going year by year and kind of leap frogging back and forth between different

technologies evolving at different rates. Um, that was just the call I made when I was building out these episodes. So, uh, you've gotta remember that the progress of magnetic tape is also connected in many ways to other technologies. Including stuff like the evolution of the microphone and the development of amplification tubes and later amplification transistors. But we're gonna start

with a Danish engineer named valdam Our Poulson. Though some other smarty pants had already been theorizing that magnetic recording could be a possibility, but it was Poulson's work that would produce the first actual working devices. Everything else was kind of theoretical. Sometime around nine, Poulson developed a machine that could record sound onto a length of steel wire

through means a magnetism. He called it the telegraphone. I'm guessing it's telegraphone perhaps, But how the heck does the darn thing work? Let alone? How is it pronounced? Well, imagine you've got a ferro magnetic material. So this is like, you know, something like iron. This is a material that if you expose it to a magnetic field, it will remain magnetized by that field. You take the field away, the material still remains magnetized, so it doesn't just have

magnetic effect in the presence of a magnetic field. The magnetic field itself will magnetize the material, at least until some other magnetic force acts upon it. Now before you record anything onto a fresh strip of magnetic tape or in the case of Poulson's device, steel wire, the material isn't magnetized. It's in its raw state, so it's just waiting as a blank medium. You take a microphone and you play sound into the microphone. Maybe you're singing into it,

maybe you're playing an acoustic guitar. But the vibrations from the sound cause a small diaphragm inside the microphone to vibrate, and the diaphragm transfers those vibrations to other elements in the microphone. Those elements depend upon the type of microphones, so not all microphones are exactly the same. They all work on a similar principle, but the details are different. However, for simplicity sake, let's talk about dynamic microphones for the

purposes of this discussion. The diaphragm would cause a coil of conductive wire to move around a magnetic core. So imagine you've got a coil and the coil is uh is wrapped around a magnetic core loose wrapped around and the coil can move back and forth laterally along this core.

If you remember how electro magnetism works. You'll remember that if you happen to move a conductor in and out of a magnetic field, or you subject the conductive material to a fluctuating magnetic field, it induces current to flow through that conductor. The electric current is pretty weak coming out of a microphone, but it represents the fluctuations of the diaphragm, which in turn are representations of the sound vibrations that hit that diaphragm. So think of it this way.

Sound hits the diaphragm, diaphragm vibrates, the vibrates cause vibrations, cause this coil to move back and forth across this magnetic core. That induces current to flow through the wire, and then you've got an electric current. You can use that current to drive a different electro magnet. Typically you would wrap the wire around a ferromagnetic or iron lie core, and as the current flows through the wire coiled around

this core, the electro magnet generates a magnetic field. So it's kind of recreating the magnetic field that was uh fluctuating when the coil was vibrating in the microphone side. So it's sort of the same thing I just described earlier, but in reverse magnetic recording devices use such an electro magnet too imprint a magnetic recording onto the medium. So typically the core is actually a disc or a ring. It's very small, and there is a wire coiled around

one side of the ring. Think of like a washer, like a washer that you would get from a hardware store, a little round disc. And imagine that you've wrapped this particular little round disk happens to be magnet or at least it's feral magnetic, and you've wrapped a wire, a conductive wire, around one side of that disk, and then you cut a gap at the bottom of that disk. That that gap is what is going to be very

close to the recording medium. The gap actually causes the magnetic field that will be generated when electric current flows through the wire to fringe outward, and it's this that magnetizes the recording medium passing below. So you've generated this magnetic fluctuation by feeding an electrical signal that you had generated with the microphone. And remember that electric signal represents

the original sound. You need the recording medium to pass by that electromagnet at a regular speed to get a clear, undistorted recording. So it's very important that the speed at which the medium passes under this recording head is is nice and regular. As the medium passes by this electromagnet, the material in the medium is magnetized according to those

fluctuations from the magnetic field. When you're on you've got a length of that medium, whether it's tape or it's steel wire that has imprinted on it, those magnetized particles, and they will stay in those magnetic orientations unless you expose them to a more powerful magnetic field, in which case they will re orient. This, by the way, is why if you've ever worked with any sort of magnetic storage, people would tell you make sure you don't have any

powerful magnets nearby it. That's why, because the powerful magnets could re orient the magnetic particles in that material and thus erase whatever was recorded on them. That's why if you are destroying magnetic storage, you typically expose it to a very powerful magnet first. To play back recorded sound. You would then take this medium where you've got these magnetized particles, and you would run them under a tape head. Uh.

It's essentially it's exactly the same thing. In fact, it could be the same head as the recording tape head. And in this case, you don't actually have a current running through that wire. It's the ferromagnetic core and it's the coil wrapped around up. But the coil at the

moment is inert, there's no electricity running through it. When you run the magnetic material past this, then you create those magnetic fluctuations which induce electricity to flow through the wire wrapped around the ferro magnetic core, and you reproduce the electric current that was used to create the magnetic fluctuations that were imprinted on the material in the first place.

So you're just you're reversing the whole process. And again it's because of that electromagnetic phenomena where you have the magnetized material running past a conductor that's wrapped around ferro magnetic core. You technically don't even need the ferro magnetic core to do this. It's just it makes it easier. It kind of it almost acts like amplifier, so that's

really why it's there. And then that current that's generated can be then sent to amplifiers which will take in that signal and boost its strength so that that signal can then drive something like speakers and then you get the sound. So the steel wire approach worked, but it produced recordings of pretty low sound quality. It was not something you could use for music or for performance. Recorders using magnetic wire did find their way into some products

with later innovators. They took that same idea that Pulson had, and mostly you would get dictation machines that were used by hoity toity executive types who would dictate their words to be preserved on wire for later transcription. Then you have a German businessman named Louis Blattner who wanted to take this technology and to develop it further. Well, not not himself personally, he actually told the engineers in his

company to get to work on doing that. He wanted to try and have a product he could sell to the BBC. And they made the switch from steel wire to steal tape, so it's flat piece of tape, but it's made out of steel, and they produced a device that was called the Blattner Phone, which is probably the most attractive name for a piece of technology I've ever heard.

Lou would present this gadget to the BBC and they decided it's good enough for recording speech, but it was not good enough to record sound of other stuff like like music, and a high enough quality to be considered broadcastable. The tape was, or at least the original machines the first two use tape that was six millimeters wide, so not very wide at all, and it ran through the machine at a rate of five ft per second. That's about a meter and a half per second, which is

pretty darn fast. Think about this. You've got this thin steel tape moving at that speed. You might be thinking, oh, my, Drew gees, that's pretty darn dangerous, and you would be right. You would not want to get too close to this thing, or you could get pretty badly cut. And it didn't get much better. When Blattner's team created a version that used tape. It was only three millimeters wide, but the

tape was actually better than steel wire. You've got better quality recordings, but still not to the level that could be used for broadcast, and certainly a far cry from anything that could be used for consumers. Now. While the Blatner phone was terrorizing the BBC, there was a German Austrian engineer named Dr Fritz Floimer, and he had been experimenting with a paper tape coated with lacquer and an

iron oxide powder. So iron oxide is ferro magnetic and would serve as the actual recording medium, and iron eyed oxide for a very very long time would become the go to material. There were different iron oxides that different inventors would use over the years to get better and better results, but iron oxide became kind of ve go to powder that you would use to create this kind

of magnetic tape. So the A E. G Company in Berlin negotiated with floim Er Uh to develop a device based off of his work back in ninety two, and they also collaborated with a different company called B A SF to create a magnetic recording materials and equipment. This collaboration led to a tape made from cellulose acetate rather than papers, still coated with lacquer and iron oxide, and using another cellulos acetate type of material to act as

a binder agent. The two companies presented their collaboration, which they called the Magneto Phone, which is not something you used to call the head of evil mutants, and they showed it off at the nineteen thirty five Radio Fair in Berlin. Now floim er had a bit of a sad outcome to this whole thing. Everything was done on the up and up, but his patents were later overturned

by the German National Court. They court determined that the ideas he had patented had already been presented way back in the late eighteen hundreds by none other than Valdemar Poulson, the guy who came up with that steel wire contraption that he had already described a tape based system. It's just that he wasn't able to make that one work during his lifetime. But because there was prior art, the

patents that Floeimer had had registered were overturned. German engineers continued to improve the technology, and by the early nineteen forties it was at the point where it was a legitimate alternative to the other recording methods of the time. Magnetic tape made a huge impact on that recording industry. So, for one thing, you could record way more information on a reel of tape than you could on a wax cylinder or a shellack disc, which of the other media

at the time. For another, with tape, you could edit if you're recording to a wax disc or a shell act disc, and you make a mistake, it's there and you pretty much have to scrap everything and start over, or you have to live with the mistake. With tape, you could actually record and you could literally cut and paste if you needed to the tape so that you could get rid of accidents. You could loop things if you wanted to. There are a lot of different tricks

you could do. And as we listened to the last episode, you could do multi track recordings. You could put multiple tracks side by side on the same length of tape. You know, imagine you've got a piece of tape and it's several feet long and it's maybe a couple of inches wide. You could actually fit multiple tracks side by side, and each track is a different recording, and they're all synchronized by just being next to each other on this tape. So that allowed for a lot of versatility in the

recording process and it really freed things up. Shifting the recording head over slightly allows you to record a second track or a third track. Um you could even record tracks for specific speakers. That's what allowed for stereo sound. And like I said in the last episode, Less Paul played a really big part in getting multi track recording off the ground running. Uh Ampex would actually build the device based on less Paul's requests, and they built the

first eight track recording system. So soon you had the entire recording industry relying on magnetic tape for recording, mixing, and mastering. At the time, they were mostly relying on three track systems, and then a little bit later four

track systems. The eight track actually didn't come into play until a bit later, but people began to figure out how to work with those, Like you could record four tracks onto a tape, then you can take that tape of four tracks and transfer the recording to one track of another four track recorder, and thus you could start to build a piece that way. It was more time consuming, but it was also still more versatile than the you know, just getting everybody in the same room at the same

time and hope that no one makes a mistake. So the real impact of magnetic tape I want to feature on this episode hit consumers, and we're gonna talk about that in just a second, But first let's take a quick break from the nineteen thirties to the early nineteen sixties, the format of the tape recorder was huge. It was a big, big machine. You are working with real to real tapes. That meant that you would have one reel that would have all of your audio stored on magnetic tape.

It's wrapped around this reel, and then you have a second empty reel, and you would put both of those reels on spokes on your tape recorder. Then you would take the magnetic tape from the main reel. You would carefully feed the magnetic tape through the machine so that the tape is going to pass under the tape head or over the tape head, depending upon the design of the machine, but that the tape head would it would

pass across it. Then you would feed it continuing through the machine until you could wrap it and tuck it into the secondary reel. You turn on the machine, and then the secondary reel starts to turn and starts to pull the tape through the recorder. And that meant that the magnetic tape would pass over or under the tape head, and that would create that electrical signal in the tape head that could be amplified to drive a speaker and you could play it back. It was big, it was bulky.

It required deft hands to thread the tape, and it meant it was not typically very user friendly for most people, and it was pretty expensive. There were consumer models of reel to reel tape players. You could out and buy one yourself, but very few people actually owned one, just because it was kind of a hassle to use them

and they were very expensive. Also, the reels took up a lot of space, and depending upon which model you got, you might be stuck with specific types of reels that you could use, and you couldn't use other ones because they weren't compatible. Our c A, the Radio Corporation of America that has factored so heavily in these histories, developed a reversible cassette tape as early as the late nineteen fifties, but it didn't look like the cassette tapes that were

all the rage in the nineteen eighties. The r C A cassette tape was much larger. It was about the size of a video cassette. And now I'm realizing that I'm comparing one obsolete technology against a different obsolete technology, and some of you may have no idea what I'm talking about. But the cassettes were about the size of your average paperback book. They were big and the form factor didn't really catch on, so our ci A would

scrap it. After a short while, the company Phillips created the format that would become the cassette tape that those of us who grew up in the eighties no and love. It was called a compact cassette in the early days, and Phillips developed these much smaller cassettes filled with magnetic storage back in nineteen sixty two. They unveiled the technology at the nineteen sixty three Berlin radio show, the same radio show where we got to see the earlier forms

of magnetic tape playback. So these cassettes were about the size of a credit card, much much smaller than our Cier's version. At the time, there were other magnetic storage formats that were vying for the top spot in the market, and the early versions of the Phillips cassette weren't able to produce very high quality recordings, and so they were marketed more as something to record speech to rather than music.

You would buy a tape recorder and you would buy the cassettes and you would use it to dictate, very much like the steel wire devices from decades earlier. So how the heck did the cassette become the standard with these kind of drawbacks, Well, it was largely because Phillips made a very shrewd move. The company licensed the technology to other companies for free. So if you had the means to manufacture cassettes, you could get a free license

from Phillips and then you could do it. Phillips wasn't going to take any sort of licensing fee or royalties. That way, they could make money selling machines capable of recording and playing back the stuff on tapes. And it was a savvy move that paid off, and the cassette,

despite its early limitations, received widespread adoption. Engineers would continue to work on the technology and it didn't take terribly long for the recording quality to improve to the point where it was at least feasible to use cassettes to record music. By nineteen sixty five, European companies were doing that, and the following year in sixty six, saw the United States doing the same, and right away companies were selling machines that could not only play a cassette, but also

record to blank cassettes. And this would be another thing that would make an enormous impact on the recording industry. For two decades, Vinyl would still hold out over prerecorded cassettes. It's not like prerecorded cassettes immediately displaced vinyl records, but in the nighties, prerecorded music cassettes overtook vinyl sales and things changed dramatically. The compact cassettes quality was pretty much always held up as inferior to a good vinyl album.

Cheap cassettes had a lot of tape hiss, and tape hiss is produced by the magnetic particles that are on the tape. The larger the particles are, the more hiss you will hear during a recording. It's kind of the base level or the the room noise of a tape. And you can reduce tape hiss a couple of different ways. One is by recording sound at a higher tape speed, which effectively uses more tape to cord the same amount

of sounds. So instead of saying, let's say that one version would have a second equals you know, let's say eight inches of tape, which is pretty fast, and another one a second equal sixteen inches of tape, Well, you're using twice as much tape to record the same amount of sound, and you also reduce hiss that way. You can also reduce hiss by reducing the size of the magnetic particles themselves. If you get finer grains of iron oxide than it brings down hiss, and then other technologies

later on would reduce hiss further. But early in the time, the early days of cassette tapes, hiss was one of those issues, and cheaper tapes would still kind of create a hissing sound even late in the cassette tape era. That sound quality issue allowed another type of tape cassette to emerge as a contender for a relatively short while. So you had the compact cassette that was pretty versatile

but not giving you the best sound quality. This rival had much better sound quality but less versatility, and that was the famed eight track tape. The eight track was able to take a spot the cassette wasn't quite ready for in nineteen as a format for prerecorded content, specifically music, and it was the product of an odd collaboration. The

partners of that collaboration included Ampex. That was the company that made the eight track recorder for Les Paul, and it also included r C A Records as a prime contributor.

And then there was the Lear Jet Company, which, yeah, that's kind of weird, right, company known for making jets, played a major role in developing a magnetic tape technology for music, and William Lear, the head of the company, used his connections to convince executives at Ford Motors to come on board and make an eight track player and option on every single nineteen sixties six Ford model, and that was a huge boost for the eight track, and

it was considered a great solution. You could take your music with you and you could listen to it in the car. So there's something else that I gotta talk about, just briefly before I get into more about the eight tracks, which was that in the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties, leading up to the introduction of the eight track, a few companies had experimented with vinyl turntable systems for cars, which sounds crazy for understandable reasons. It was not an

easy thing to do. You have to rely on a format that has a physical needle or stylus moving through a tiny groove on a spinning disk. Meanwhile, you're driving a vehicle on different surfaces, it's probably not the most

reliable way of hearing high fidelity tunes. So while some companies tried that, including CBS, which introduced a record format just for cars that spun at sixteen and two thirds rp ms than a specific player that spun at that speed, which meant that you had to have discs recorded at that speed to be able to use it. They these systems never got much momentum, and that's a pun. So eight track tapes are portable. You could have a few

in your car. You can plug them into your system listen to tunes, and that came in handy if your radio wasn't picking up any strong signals, or if the stuff playing in your area didn't meet your personal musical tastes. And this was a time when FM stereo wasn't really widely available in the nineteen sixties. You know, you couldn't get it everywhere, So there was a niche to be filled for for higher quality sound in cars, and the eight track one out over another format, the four track.

There was a four track tape as well, but the quality of an eight track was far superior to cassettes of the same era, and it would take more advances in cassette technology for the cassette format to surpass that of the eight track, and music labels jumped on board. They gave a lot of port for eight track tapes in the early days, and it had a pretty strong

run for about a decade. But by the mid nineteen seventies, improvements in cassette technology, including reducing tape hiss and Dolby invented a noise reduction approach, along with the introduction of high bias tape coding UH that really made cassettes viable against eight tracks. Plus, cassette tapes were easy to record on. If you wanted, you could buy blank tapes, put them in a tape recorder and take music from some other source like the radio, which is what I used to

do as a kid. And man, did I hate it when DJs would start talking at the end or beginning of songs and ruining my song. Man, shut up, does let it play? The eight track faded from the consumer space over the course of another decade, so cassettes took over after about ten years, but the eight track held on. It didn't just disappear immediately. By the mid nineteen seventies, the major companies had stopped making eight track players, but the format itself hung on a little bit longer than that.

Companies were still produced seeing eight track albums for several years after that. Um though, it was actually a challenge to find a store that would carry eight tracks while the cassette was taking off because stores loved cassettes. They took up very little space, so you can have a pretty wide selection of music without requiring an enormous amount of physical store space, and cassettes didn't have some of

the capacity limitations that eight track tapes had. An eight track typically divided up an album into four stretches of tape called programs, and there was an audible gap between programs. There was a limited amount of tape that the eight track could hold, and it usually meant that at least one song on an album wouldn't make it onto the eight track version, and some songs would fall right on

that break between two programs. Typically that would mean that the song you were listening to would fade out, then there would be an audible click, then there would be a pause of silence while the next program was getting pulled through the player, and then the song would fade up again, essentially where it left off, which wasn't ideal. Cassettes had a bit more versatility, allowing record labels to fit an entire side of a vinyl album onto one

side of a cassette tape. Cassettes were also seen as more portable than eight tracks. It was possible to have a cassette player in a car or stereo system, or a boom box, or a portable cassette player like the famed Sony Walkman. People could have their music on the go.

They could jog while listening to music. The convenience and portability, paired with the capability of recording stuff of your own choosing onto tape whether it was someone else's stuff or your own, that made cassettes the clear winner over eight tracks, And while those early cassettes still weren't necessarily viewed by audio files as being particularly good, they also were winning out over vinyl for those same reasons with the general consumer.

The philosophy of convenience and accessibility over fidelity was winning in the mainstream public, much to the chagrin of many audio files out there, and the cassette gave opportunities to independent musicians that they otherwise never would have had more about that in just a second. But first let's take another quick break. So the recording industry typically works like this. You're a musician, or you're in a band or something.

You play gigs whenever you can, You practice, you write songs, you practice some more, you get better over time, you develop your sound, your style, your voice, and generally you figure out who the heck you are musically speaking. You might submit your music to record labels, you might hire a manager to try and take care of that for you, or maybe you're super lucky and someone influential sees one of your shows and you get a meeting with a

record label representative. Then you negotiate, you sign a deal, and now bam, you get yourself a record contract, which is a great fairy tale, and for some people it does work out that way. But you've got thousands of people for every success story who make music, but they're not being heard by record labels, and that's not necessarily

out of malice or anything like that. And then there are musicians who would rather stay independent than sign on with a record company in the first place, since the company might dictate what the musician can or can't record or what they should sound like. The cassette tape gave people but that were in that category a lot of new chances. The recording equipment was relatively inexpensive. Blake cassettes were likewise pretty darn cheap, and they also are pretty rugged.

You could record music to a cassette, you could duplicate the cassette, and then you can mail off the duplicates to people in the mail and the tape was probably gonna survive because it's it's pretty hardy stuff. And indie culture developed around this practice, with different musicians and music enthusiasts trading tapes back and forth and spreading music that way outside the recording industry system. So you had this kind of thriving independent scene that was growing because of

the cassette tape. The cassette and the introduction of sound systems like the boombox also allowed people to share music with others in an unprecedented way. It was easy to bring a boombox to a location, popping a cassette and then blast out the tunes, so people nearby could hear the music, you know, whether they wanted to or not. But it allowed for the development of music communities and cultures like hip hop, so whole new genres of music we're growing out of the adoption and use of this

recorded medium. At first, the recording industry was totally on board with cassette culture, but this gradually changed as executives realized the format allowed people to easily reproduce prerecorded cassettes. They feared a hit to the bottom line. So here's

how their doomsday scenario might play out. A music fan let's call him Jonathan, decides to purchase a brand new cassette copy of the album Speaking in Tongues by Talking Heads because he really digs the song this must be the Place, which is pretty much all true because that song is perfect, okay, But Jonathan, loving this song, gets

an idea. He bought this cassette for let's say the princely sum of twelve dollars, and he goes out and buys a whole bunch of blank cassettes for twenty bucks, so he's brought his investment up to thirty two dollars. Then he starts duplicating his copy of Speaking in Tongues and then sells the copies for just five dollars each. And after selling seven copies he's recaptured all the costs of both the blank cassettes and the original tape, and

undercutting local music stores and the recording label. Sire Records, which was the recording label doesn't get the benefit from all those copies that Jonathan is selling. So music industry executives were understandably concerned. They hated this idea with a

passion hotter than a thousand exploding suns. Several companies than the British Phonographic Industry Trade Group decided to launch a pr campaign against the practice, with a claim that quote home taping is killing music end quote music, by the way, is still alive and well today, just in case were worried, And I'm sure this argument sounds familiar to you. If it doesn't, it will by the end of the series, because it's gonna come up again and again in different forms.

So while the record labels were freaking out, lots of musicians were actually encouraging the practice of copying music and

sharing it with others. Lots of musicians were concerned more with their music being heard by a larger number of people than with the actual record sales numbers, and the slogan home taping is killing music became sort of a joke among a certain set of musicians, particularly in the punk rock music scene, which was just really taking off in the in the late seventies, and that was already firmly in the anti establishment headspace. Dead Kennedy's were famous

for doing this. Now, music piracy was possible, it could happen, but it wasn't really rampant in the cassette days. In most places, hired in music still took money and time and effort. You had to get hold of a copy

of the music. You had to get hold of blank cassettes, and then you had to spend the time record hoarding from the original onto a copy, and most recorders would only allow you to do that at playback speed, So if you have an hour long album, it would take an hour for you to copy it onto a single blank cassette. So it wasn't exactly uh, something that was easy to mass manufacture, and I think most of those

fears were largely unwarranted. Something that happened more frequently were mixtapes made recently famous by the guardians of the Galaxy movies. People began to rifle through their music collections and put together a series of songs for folks they knew, and there was a real art to this. According to some people, there were even rules you should absolutely follow to get the best result. For example, some officionados will tell you that a mix tape should never feature the same artist

or group on it twice, no repeats. So if you open with the Kinks All Day and All of the Night, which came out in nineteen sixty five, and then you ended the mixtape with the Kinks song Apeman, which came out in you would technically be breaking that rule. Now, personally, I think that's silly because some bands like the Kinks can change their sound dramatically over the course of their careers. It almost sounds like two totally different bands. But never

mind all that. Anyway, you can search the internet to find out about the rules of making mixtapes. Everyone has their own set, and these days those same rules carry over into making playlists, so it still has relevance. The mixtape culture became an important social interaction. It provided a new way to clue people in as to what kind of person you are, and it gave folks a chance to put something together for someone else, showing that they

were thinking about them. So if you received a mixtape, particularly a really good one, it was a huge thrill because it showed that someone else was thinking about you and trying to craft an experience that you would really enjoy. So the eight track had a rain of around nineteen sixty six to nineteen seventy, and then the compact cassette.

The cassette tape took over from there and really caught on in the nineteen eighties, but it too would have a short run as the king of media, because the compact disc would debut in the late nineteen eighties and by the following decade would all but annihilate the compact cassette. During this same era, there was another huge change that was taking place in the United States as well as other parts of the world, but I'm mainly going to focus on the US, and that was the nature of

copyright law. In the US. The government had passed a Copyright Act way back in nineteen o nine, but it hadn't really touched it since. But in the decades following nineteen o nine, it became clear that copyright law would

need an update. Technology was allowing for the broadcast and preservation of intellectual property in new ways, from radio to television, two recorded media like vinyl albums and cassettes, and the Universal Copyright Convention and International Agreement on Copyright had debuted back in nineteen fifty two in Switzerland, and the United States joined that convention in nineteen fifty five, but it wasn't until nineteen seventies six that the US government was

ready to pass some new copyright rules in the nineteen seventy six Copyright Act. The new act created protections of all sorts of intellectual property, and it also extended the terms of protection. Under the nineteen o nine Act, a copyrighted work would receive protection for twenty eight years since from the date of its origin, with the possibility of a twenty eight year extension, so ultimately you could protect it for fifty six years total. The nineteen seventy six

Act changed that. Under the nineteen seventy six Act, a work is protected by copyright for the length of the author's life plus fifty years. That would get changed again in nineteen with the Copyright Term Extension Act that pushed it to the author's life plus seventy years, and for works created before nineteen seventy eight. The rules are a

little different. There are several factors that determine the length of copyright protection, but many works were given seventy six years of protection from the year of their creation or publication. The extension would push that to ninety five years. And if you're wondering why is this happening, what what's important about this? And and how is or how are all these changes happening, Well, it's largely because of really big

companies that rely on intellectual property for their value. For example, the Walt Disney Company. A lot of people refer to these extensions as Walt Disney extensions. The Walt Disney Company certainly does not want it's it's formative works falling into the public domain if it can help it, because then once they're in the public domain, anyone can use them

under certain circumstances. There are other protections that are in place as well, but you know, copyrights goes into public domain and then anyone can can show this stuff without any fear of the mouse House coming down on them. So without the extension, Mickey Mouse would have gone into the public domain in two thousand four. Under the Original

Copyright Act of nineteen seventy six. Now he's set to skip off into the public domain in twenty twenty four, and as of right now, there has not been another change to copyright law to change that date. So we're looking at mickeymails going into the public domain unless something

changes within the next few years. My point with all of that is to say, the changing technology from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries meant that suddenly things that used to be ephemeral, you know, like a performance, could now be made permanent. People could have a permanent record of that, a permanent way of recreating those performances, when before you just had to be there when it happened, and and

if you weren't, you missed it. And these things have value not just to the creators, but to the audiences as well, and that this drove changes in technology, in culture, and in law. But we're not done yet. In our next episode, I'm going to talk a bit about how the videotape made a similar impact in film and television as the cassette did in the music industry, and we'll

also look at the rise of the compact disc. Still to come is the transition to digital formats and then beyond DVDs and things of that nature, and blue rays. We're going to talk about digital files, and then we're going to talk about different ways of delivering it, from downloading it to streaming it, and how all of this has affected our behaviors, business, and even the process of creating the entertainment in the first place. I hope you

guys are enjoying this series of episodes. I've really enjoyed jumping into it. I like doing the sort of thematic approach and a deep dive on a specific topic. But once we're done with these, will be going back to lots of other kind of one off tech stuffs, So don't worry if this wasn't your cup of tea, we're gonna be getting back to other tech stuff stuff in the near future. Tech stuff stuff, I should make a

sure about that. Meanwhile, if you guys want to get in touch with me, you can send me an email the addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can pop on over to our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com. You'll find links to our social media presence as well as to the store and an archive of all of our past episodes. I hope you guys can go check that out. I look forward to hearing from you, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y tech Stuff is a production of I

Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.