Tell me some silly facts about cassette tape production…

The compact cassette tape was launched by Philips in 1963 and by 1983 they were outselling vinyls. The peak year of production for pre-recorded cassettes was 1990 with 442 million sold, however blank audio cassettes were far more popular and peaked in 1996 with just over 2 billion blank cassette tapes sold (source: vintagecassette.com). There aren’t any precise figures, but about 30 billion cassette tapes have probably been made to date, which if the cassette shells were placed end-to-end they could stretch from the earth to the moon and back four times. Alternatively, if the average cassette tape was a C60 tape with 30 minutes on each side then that is about 85m of cassette reel in each tape, equating to about 2.5 billion km of cassette tape, which could stretch to planet Jupiter and back over two times, or wrap around planet Earth over 66,000 times. Not a lot of people know that…

Find out more about our cassette tape production here…