More than half a century ago, Dutch inventor Lodewijk Ottens and his colleagues at Philips developed the cassette tape. Their invention was great for selling pre-recorded music in a compact, easily portable format, or as empty media for recording and copying sound. The compact cassette started a whole new era in music culture.

Young fans placed high value on BIC ballpoint pens, which were just the right size to fit inside the reel to rewind the tape manually to the desired track and save the batteries in their Walkman. It took a couple of minutes to rewind five tracks.

Empty cassettes were a great gift, and were often valued higher than pre-recorded ones. They were perfect for making your own playlist, by copying your favorite tracks in the order you wanted. Compact cassettes could easily fit in the pocket, were cheap and easy to reuse.

To promote proliferation of the new invention, Philips decided not to restrict production rights for the compact cassette. Within a year, a new cassette making company emerged, NAC, which went on to become the industry leader.

The cassette tape was replaced by compact disks, which were in turn squeezed out by USB drives, but audio compact cassettes are making a comeback.

Artists as diverse as Prodigy, Kylie Minogue, Take That and other famous performers released their albums on compact cassettes again in 2018.

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