It also helped people create new narratives out of the music they liked, and by extension, of their lives. 'The cassette suddenly became a representation of your whole personality, a tool to make someone else feel the emotions that you feel. This was a new psychological phenomenon, which became even more important with the advent of the compilation tape.

How do I feel right now? How do I want to feel in five minutes? What kind of music is going to help me reach these goals? And if I'm on the train, who will overhear what I'm playing?' 'Before going out and travelling with our music, we could now make psychological choices. Raymond Macdonald, Professor of Music Psychology at Edinburgh University, believes that portable cassettes changed the very way we thought about ourselves. (The last car to have a cassette deck was manufactured relatively recently – the 2010 Lexus SC430 convertible.) In-car decks were also the first machines to have an 'auto-reverse' function, allowing listeners to enjoy music on a loop without taking their eyes off the road. The arrival of the in-car cassette deck in the early 1970s is also often forgotten, turning every car journey into a sound-and-vision movie. They also had speakers, long before boomboxes and mobile phones pushed sounds out in public. However, Philips was marketing the portable nature of its E元301T cassette decks as early as 1966.

The Walkman is usually credited as the product that made people carry their music around with them.

Philips was marketing its portable cassette players long before the arrival of the Sony Walkman.

Cassette duplication diy