Sorry if this is an ugly post, I'm still getting to grips with posting here. I posted this on r/cassetteculture too. I've posted them as full images so its easier to see each one. I had about 6 tapes of my own from my holiday in the US, and when I came home my brother gave me all of his. I got the four on top in the first picture from my local music shop. £15 for all four, a little expensive but its the only music shop near me that has so many tapes so I was okay with the price. You'll probably notice there's a loose tape in the first picture, don't worry, I hate that too but it unfortunately doesn't have a case. It's an Eagles tape as well which is even worse haha, hopefully I can find a spare case for it at some point. I really want to get a proper rack for them so that they not only look neater, but its easier to grab one.
I had to look up the Revolver Tape on Discogs, wow 1968, that's one of the oldest tapes I've seen. I've got a huge box similar to your first four tapes, an older relative had around 40 tapes and they gifted them to me, you can't go wrong with Elvis, I tend to listen to the movie soundtracks the most (Viva Las Vegas Baby!). K-Tel started here, I've told this story before but when things were going digital, they sold their factory to Roller Blades who cashed out and sold to K2 for billions.
Wow I had no idea that tape was from 1968, it was one of the ones my brother gave me and I've not given it a listen yet. I do love Elvis' music and I hope I can find even more tapes, I'm a fan of his (relatively) newer songs like If I Can Dream and A Little Less Conversation, maybe one day when I have a deck I'll record a tape with all my Elvis favourites
Enjoy your cassettes anewtaper, the only one of those cassettes I have is the Formula thirty 2. I have not played it in a while must dig it out.
Your collection is tidier than mine as it is all in one place. I looked back to 1989 to see all the cassette storage options available in Argos. Apart from the wooden rack I had variations of all of these. The revolving rack is quite cool but takes up quite a bit of space. Have you seen EPIC "Elvis Presley In Concert". I'm not a big Elvis fan but went to see it when I had a morning to kill while my car was being serviced. I enjoyed it more than I expected especially as I recognised almost every song. Back to pre-recorded cassettes I have pointed out many times that Ford were still selling Cars (Kas) with a factory fitted cassette deck here back in 2008. Until around then it was common for petrol stations and motorway services to have a variety of tapes for sale. Quite a lot of your collection, especially the "Best Of"s look like the sort of thing they would stock. In contrast to the Beatles tape I was trying to work out what the newest one was. Maybe "Abba Gold" as that wasn't released until 1992. Interestingly Wikipedia claims it was the first Abba compilation optimised for CD. I guess many people with cassette players still wanted a cassette version.
I started uploading my music to Discogs, it's kind of fun if you have a decent size collection. The numbers on the side will show up in their database and give more details. Some releases will have multiple versions spread across years and pressing plants. Tapes made before 1975 are pretty rare, after that the floodgates opened.
Agreed, using Discogs it's fun to see how many different pre-recorded formats some releases had. I have a couple of factory released pre-recorded titles that I have on vinyl LP, 8-track, reel to reel, cassette, CD and Minidisc. The hardest to put all 6 together is getting the reel to reel, and the Minidisc. You are wondering what are the titles? Carol King - Tapestry and Michael Jackson - Thriller. I'm a cassette tape away from putting the Dave Brubeck Quartet - Time Out into the 6 format club.
This collection also could be the one from Mr. Hirayama, the main character in Wim Wenders movie "Perfect Days" from 2023. This man mainly listens to music from prerecorded cassette tapes in his car. In a special Tokyo shop for analog recordings he is advised to sell his tapes, because they are rare and expensive - but he doesn`t agree. A younger girl - the girlfriend of his employee , once is taken along in the car, is very facinated by his tapes. You can see, also Mr. Wenders touches the boom of cassettes, and may be promotes them.
I'll have to look that movie up, it sounds good. LanceR, you are a beast! Titles on basically all the formats! That's fascinating on a whole new level, please start a thread with photos. I've never thought about that but once you add in stuff like SanDisk, Stereo Microcassette and some of the other very obscure formats, there's not going to be many crossovers.
