Reel It Up and Start Again:¹
Music Media, Formats and Material Culture
in the Era of Streaming

Music Media, Material Culture and Audio Formats

It is commonly assumed that music’s medium is sound. But, do you consider light to be the medium of a painting or a movie? Or do you most likely think about a canvas, a projector, or a screen?² Music has a vital connection to the technologies and social connections that are involved in performing sound and making it available to others. The physical objects—tangible, material “things” that one can touch, see, feel, and use—make up what we refer to as the material culture of music (Titon and Slobin 1996: 12). These include artifacts such as musical instruments or the papers that hold music scores, as well as other forms of media involved in music’s recording, transmission, and playback. Here is where formats come in. Generally, a format is the way in which something is arranged or set out. With reference to audio, format indicates a medium with specific qualities and practices required for its use that determine the way sound is recorded, circulated, and reproduced, such as a CD or an Mp3 file. A vast number of formats precede the ways in which you hear music nowadays.

Take a look at this list of audio formats. Which aspects of their "evolution" strike you the most? Where can you trace the transition from “analog” to “digital”?

Find cassettes on the list and visualize what prior technologies inspired their function and look, and what technological “advancements” were made to them before the introduction of the CD.

A format denotes a whole range of decisions that affect the look, feel, experience, and workings of a medium. It also names a set of rules according to which a technology can operate (Sterne 2013: 7). As you can see from the list of audio formats and their historical development, there are two main categories in which music formats are usually grouped: analog and digital. It is commonly assumed that analog refers to physical formats—those that you can touch, such as cassettes or vinyl records—and that digital refers to invisible information that you store in your computer in the form of, let’s say, an Mp3 file. However, differentiating analog and digital formats is not about how tangible a music output is, but rather about how the information it carries was recorded onto it. Do you remember where the CD was in the list of audio formats? Analog formats record waves, which is the original form in which sound travels, and digital music uses binary information, in the form of numbers (zeroes and ones), which are sampled from the original waves at a rate that depends on the device that will store it, or the preference of compression that you or others may have. These numbers are later translated into a voltage wave that resembles the original sound wave but will always demand electronic “translation.”³

Most of the music that you hear on a daily basis is digital—you get it mainly through streaming services, right? This is not arbitrary. There are many reasons as to why digital audio formats are so commonplace nowadays. One of them is portability and instantaneity: millions of songs can travel as information to your phone in a matter of seconds, and hundreds can be stored in your device’s virtual library and do not require any space in shelves or boxes. Other reasons are the easy and direct ways in which you can access these recordings—through a variety of platforms and services—and the crisp sound that comes every time you press play, which will not be changed by the passing of time. Analog formats are a different story. Because the music they store is recorded into the materiality of the format itself (the grooves of the vinyl record or the magnetic tape of cassettes), manipulating these media eventually leads to their malfunction and loss of sound quality. Factors such as humidity or heat can contribute to their decay. Today, many people continue to choose analog formats not in lieu of but as a complement of digital ones. Individuals usually express their reasons for choosing such formats in terms of experience and sound quality.⁴

Even with proper playback equipment, analog formats demand many practices and specific operational knowledge from listeners. Some scholars argue that the specific technological protocols that each format demands play a role in the ways people relate to the music they listen to (Straw 2003, Osbourne 2012, Sterne 2013). Creating different kinds of relations around music is precisely why the people behind the cassette scenes in Argentina spend hours pushing buttons on double-deck tape recorders. Through the mediation of cassettes, people connect in ferias (merch tables) at shows or festivals, and bands and labels connect with each other through compilations and organize tours in neighboring countries. And because of the particularities of cassettes as a storage technology, those listening to them are expected to “connect” with albums without skipping songs. The first time that Chilean band The Holydrug Couple visited Córdoba (Argentina) was as part of a tour that local label Volante Discos organized for them, after they released a casette of the demos of their acclaimed Noctuary album. This tour, which united hundreds of psych-rock fans (I was among them!), happened because of the cassette-mediated connection between Volante Discos and the Chilean band. I will return to these points later.

Another reason why many listeners choose cassettes nowadays is the sound quality, which in the analog/digital divide is often framed in terms of high-fi and low-fi (fi is short for fidelity). Some argue that analog formats bring a specific “warmth” to music and admire the organic feel of a needle circling against the groove of a record. Others may experience this as a “noisy” kind of signal in comparison to the clean sound of a digital file. Some may privilege the “lo-fi” sound of cassette tapes, which builds on the ethos of DIY (do-it-yourself) aesthetics; others prefer a higher dynamic range and the more direct sound of digital files.

More Than a Format: Cassettes as Emancipatory Music Media

Cassettes are often remembered with dismay by those individuals who are thankful for the ways in which digital technologies have mended some of the more characteristic shortcomings of tape. Mainly: the lo-fi sound that gets worse the more you play a cassette (your favorite songs would sound muffled as the tape de-magnetized with every reproduction); playback misfortunes, like having the magnetic tape reeled out of the spool (this is what the pencil is for!); and other challenges associated with the protocol of tapes as technologies, such as having to rewind or fast forward to the specific song that you wanted to hear every time, or having to abide by length restrictions (usually 60 or 90 minutes) when making a compilation for that someone you wanted to impress.

However problematic, cassettes’ impact in the music industry was revolutionary; because they were cheap and portable, they empowered countless small music-cultures and enabled productive interactions between them. Hip hop, for example, would not be what it is today without people circulating music from their favorite underground artists via mix tapes (see Rose 1994, Toop 1999, Harrison 2006). Consider this: which record company in the late seventies and early eighties would have invested in an actively political music genre coming from marginalized youth who were voicing discontent with systematic racism? Tapes are a huge part of how hip hop circulated in its formative period. Did you ever consider how rap might have traveled all the way to the West Coast decades before computer mediated file-sharing?

Cassettes, because they are cheap, portable, and people can record things onto them themselves easily (unlike vinyl, for example), enabled drastic transformations in the ways music was created and circulated, which until then was mainly from the top down (meaning controlled and policed by those who have more power). Tapes democratized access to music-making and its spread, now coming from grassroots organizations, and it empowered subcultural niches or political statements without having to rely on those who traditionally held the power to decide which music would be edited and marketed to the masses (for more on tapes as “emancipatory micro-media” see Manuel 1993). Moreover, because you could record any music you liked from the radio or from a friend’s vinyl record onto tapes, with the advent of cassettes also came one of the first forms of music “piracy” and concerns over copyright laws.

Choosing Analog Formats in a Digital Age: The Argentinian Cassette Scene

The widespread use and massive popularity of cassette tapes decades ago is not something that is difficult to grasp. Tapes, and the technologies around them, empowered people in many ways. In every corner of the world, they gave unprecedented possibilities to groups marginalized from mainstream or market-aimed production to circulate music, diversify repertoires, and fuel countless small music cultures—from punk and heavy metal to rural folk songs and hip hop. Cassettes also revolutionized practices of music consumption that are now commonplace, such as doing mixtapes (which now take the form of playlists) or individual listening. Did you know that before the Walkman, people had never listened to music with headphones in a public space (see Tuhus-Dubrow 2017)?

But why do tapes continue to empower music-cultures at a time when music can travel instantaneously through your mobile device, for a small fee to a service provider? For many years, I have been doing fieldwork in Argentina with different versions of this question in my mind. In the midst of an ever-growing economic crisis, labels in Argentina have turned to cassettes to materialize the relations that connect them with bands and musical works in ways that escape the conventions of streaming and digital file exchange. Although most cassette labels are located in Buenos Aires, the nation’s capital, there are numerous other labels operating in every corner of the country, pushing for a more de-centralized alternative music scene. Increasingly throughout the years, because of the work of labels in cities such as Rosario, La Pampa, Córdoba, or Bariloche, exchanging cassettes has become a more nationally inclusive enterprise. Connections via cassette also challenge other kinds of barriers, in addition to geo-cultural ones, such as the barriers that divide music scenes in terms of their genre or style. Although there are different kinds of circuits for cassette circulation in Argentina, it is not uncommon to find festivals that facilitate cassettes’ exchange nucleating labels from different musical identities, from hardcore punk to indie folk to synth pop.

There is a falseness in common conversations on revivalism, in that they imply that cassettes at some point in history died and are now being re-born. However exciting it is to live this fantasy, the truth is that outside of Western Europe and North America, tapes never ceased to be a common recording medium (Demers 2017). In Argentina, for example, although in numbers that would hardly compare to those that were produced during cassettes’ heyday, tapes never ceased to be circulated among punk and heavy metal circuits. What is mistakenly called a “revival” in Argentina (which may be the case for scenes elsewhere⁵) refers to the increasing number of labels representing a myriad of musical styles, and mostly led by young millennials, that began appearing across the nation during the last seven years. Many revival movements and the practices around them are framed under “nostalgia,” but in my study in Argentina, thinking about nostalgia does not always fit. Most of those individuals running tape labels in Argentina were not alive during the cassette’s heyday and developed a somewhat atemporal relation with tapes. I read the resurgence of cassette-related practices as coming from two major sources: a need to challenge the current context whereby music travels as information and is exchanged without face-to-face interactions; and a longing for analog sound that has to adapt to the conditions and resources available in Argentina, where vinyl production is scarce and limited to the big music corporations that can afford it. Tapes, I find, are being brought back mainly to elicit new forms of relations between people via the mediation of a musical object, as well as to reclaim certain practices around music consumption forgotten in the Spotify era, such as listening to an album from beginning to end.

Peta is one of the protagonists of this story. He is one half of Hallo Discos, one of the first “new” labels that started recuperating cassettes almost ten years ago. Hallo experimented with pressing vinyl for one of label's bands (with the only do-it-yourself vinyl maker that Gastón, the second half of Hallo, brought all the way from Germany) with unsuccessful results. Peta and Gastón decided to turn to cassettes instead; they are from a generation that grew up listening to them. By chance (or maybe fate?) a “vintage items” store where they visited to buy blank tapes was run by someone who knew the owner of a cassette factory that had stopped functioning not long before. This serendipitous encounter led to Peta’s instrumental role in re-opening the factory, helping to calibrate the machines, testing them with his label's releases, and eventually spreading the word to others who were equally eager to edit musical acts in a physical, analog medium. The factory still operates with the same machines that it did decades ago, although, naturally, with significantly less demand. This is the process of making cassettes in an “open circuit,” standardized fashion:

Tape Factory

There are essentially two forms of cassette production available for labels in Argentina: closed and open circuit, or artisanal and standardized methods of production. Some cassette-labels prefer to rely on the “professional” imprint of the factory. As you can see from the pictures below, the factory provides a very complete service, managing not only the recording of the analog tape (in a mechanical process that allows every copy to sound the same), but also screen-printing cassettes, handling the j-cards or inlays (the pieces of paper tucked inside the cases), and even packaging. The man you see in the video, Luis, is the sole employee in charge of cassettes in this factory, which also produces CDs in a standardized fashion. Because the machine records dozens of tapes in only a few minutes and these cassettes cannot be tested until all are completed, any form of error in the recording process will leave a significant amount of waste.⁶

Some labels opt to be in charge of every instance in the production of their cassettes, even though this may entail spending hours pushing buttons on a tape deck and cutting dozens of inlays with scissors. They do not like the feeling of being merely in charge of distributing items that someone else made for them. This partly follows the punk tradition and the do-it-yourself ideology that was at the root of making tapes as objects of contestation. Controlling every part of the production also affords labels liberties that the factory does not allow. For example, smaller editions of 20 cassettes can have personalized information for each of them. Labels working without the factory choose to highlight the artisanal nature of their products: one-of-a-kind objects with “added value” of care and invested time. See the following video as an example of this very different form of cassette production, located in a bedroom that also functions as the headquarters of label Sin Tierra Discos.

DIY Tape

Art is a collective action (Becker 1974); it demands the cooperation of many different people. The work that individuals like Peta and Gastón, Luis, or Juan and Jazmín from Sin Tierra Discos do with cassettes is crucial for bands of different music scenes in Argentina, allowing them to have material registers of their work that help them make connections with those interested in their music on many different levels. Talking to bands who choose to record their music on cassette I learned that, for them, setting up a “merch table” at a show provides them with a space to get to know their fans. They are usually very open to bargaining and will let you pay what you have for a tape (they cost somewhere around two to four dollars). For fans, buying a cassette is often a symbolic act, regardless of whether they have a device to play it on when they get home. It signifies membership in the community: it is a way of expressing appreciation for the band by engaging in a real face-to-face interaction with them (you can’t buy any of these tapes online).

Many events started to be organized alongside bands and labels who record on cassettes. These are social worlds—events and spaces that would not exist if people had not started to record digital music onto old forgotten tapes, like the time when The Holydrug Couple visited Córdoba province thanks to Volante Discos. Cassette labels put together shows from bands in their catalogs, sometimes linking musical acts that otherwise would not perform together and even generating connections with bands from neighboring countries. Undoubtedly, the most important occasion bringing together cassette makers and enthusiasts every year is the Argentinian iteration of the International Cassette Store Day, which is celebrated every October in different parts of the world. Argentina is the only country outside of North America and Europe that has participated since its first edition in 2013, helping artists, producers, and consumers celebrate a storage format that brings them together in search of more meaningful music-mediated experiences. See some pictures of the social worlds around cassettes below:

Focusing on cassettes, this chapter has underscored the importance of non-musical elements in creating the meaning and value of music. Delving into formats and the material culture of music, I have attempted to explain why the media of music should not be taken for granted, for it plays a major role in how and why music impacts people in spaces and times dissociated from musical performances. The videos and pictures from my fieldwork have reinforced this lesson, illustrating that even when we analyze the same kind of media (in this case, cassettes), the practices and actors involved in how that medium is produced can vary, affecting the ways in which it is valued, circulated, and rendered meaningful.

Cassettes made in a factory involve particular resources and machines and require specific kinds of materials, such as the big industrial spool of tape, and have corresponding levels of waste. The resulting tapes are clean, standardized and professional-looking, ready to travel around to shows and fairs. Hand-made tapes involve different kinds of relations. They take a lot of time for those recording them (they have to wait for both sides of the tapes to get recorded!) and usually involve the collaboration of different people: someone who will print inlays and stickers for cassette cases, someone to buy tapes from, and so on. But labels that produce their own tapes are in control of all the decisions that affect the look and feel of the cassettes that they make. Although they normally produce between 20 and 50 tapes for every album, and each of these sounds slightly differently than the others, they can personalize every step involved in their making.

As you can assume, the context behind producing 100 tapes in a factory, or 20 in a bedroom setting, is vastly different than Taylor Swift teaming up with Urban Outfitters for 5,000 limited edition copies of her new album in clear plastic cassettes. My goal with this chapter was not to explain the reasons why Swift got involved in such an enterprise (she is probably well advised!), but to show you how a format, medium, or form of material culture such as a cassette can inspire and materialize different economies and forms of relations between people and music. My short overview of the practices and actors involved in Argentina’s cassette scene showcased how recuperating a long-lost format allows people from different generations (and from different music styles) to invest meaning and value in their music in a way that both adapts to the conditions and resources available to them in Argentina (where vinyl is reserved for the few who can afford it), and how it and empowers people to challenge the current context of music exchange that is primarily mediated by screens.

Suggested Discussion Questions:

• There was a time before music recordings existed in which the only way to listen to music was to see it performed live. What are different ways in which you have experienced music in your life, and how have these been mediated? Think about your first memory with music, or the first time you saw a live concert. Now think about daily experiences, like listening to music in your house or during your commute. Notice all of the different technologies involved in bringing those sounds to your ears.
• What is your preferred music format and why? Have you ever stopped to think about the characteristics of this format? Which of these is most important for you?
• Timbre is the “color” or quality of a tone, which helps you distinguish between different voices and instruments that may be playing the exact same melody at the same time. In this case, it also helps us identify different forms of music production and the “quality” of particular music recordings. Compare these two versions of “Sunday Morning” by The Velvet Underground. Can you hear any changes in the timbre as you hear it on vinyl versus later playing it on Spotify? How would you describe any differences between the recordings?
• Think of all of the music technologies that have been involved in hip hop since its formation, from turntables and mixers to cassettes and boomboxes. Can you list some of the music technologies that that are currently involved in hip hop and draw comparisons between old and new forms of technology?
• Reflect on the videos embedded in this chapter and think about the different kinds of communities that may be created around music formats that are produced in factories versus those that are produced in an artisanal fashion. Look at the pictures throughout this essay and think also about the different ways and spaces in which these differently produced cassettes may be sold.
• What do you think are the differences between the experience of buying Taylor Swift’s cassette from the Urban Outfitters website and the experiences of those buying cassettes in “merch” tables at live music shows?
• Think about other examples that may help us understand why considering media and material culture is important when analyzing music and music worlds, such as other kinds of communities that are formed around specific music technologies (e.g., audiences watching DJs or orchestras).
• How do questions about media and technology intersect with issues of access, both with regards to the place where you live/come from and in relation to affordability?

References Cited

Open Access Resources and Further Reading

A digital archive that showcases the work of cassette labels in Latin America, created by the author of this chapter!

An NY-based online cassette store that showcases a myriad of American tape labels.

A project that digitizes music from cassettes retrieved in Africa. It could be important to consider some ethical issues of “re-mediating” content, and to think about cross-cultural relations of copyright and uneven power relations.

A podcast series featuring cassette reviews.

Blog entries.

Further Reading (not Open Access)