Cassette vs Record Historical Prices?

Loving all these great cassette collections!!! Curious about when cassettes really started to take off over records; were the prices of cassettes the same as records and 8-tracks, cheaper, or more expensive? I can't find any old price lists and know the wisdom of this crowd can help!

 

You will find some UK prices (as well as many boombox and Walkman adverts) in the Smash Hits Archive

http://likepunkneverhappened.blogspot.com/2017/11/

Looking in December 1987 I spotted an advert for The Best of UB40
CD £9.99. Album and Cassette £5.49. That is how I remember it with LPs and cassettes about the same.
In the mid 1980s I bought mainly LPs as it is very easy to transfer an LP to a cassette. By 1989 I did buy quite a few pre-recorded cassettes, but only because a local shop had discounted them quite a bit.

P.s I worked out recently that in real terms vinyl is about the same price as it was in the 1980s. Ironic that CDs are now the cheapest.

 

A few more prices for you from 1986's Littlewoods catalogue. Rather amusing that you could buy your music on the weekly instalments but that was their business model.


I agree with Mister X's memories. The same catalogue had a five pack of Philips C60s for £5.

Before I got my own Stereo in 1978 I remember taping at least one LP for a friend using the Cassette Recorder microphone placed in front of the record players speaker.

8 track went almost as quickly as it came in the UK. In the mid 1970s a friend had his Fathers old 8 track from a car and a few cartridges for use in his bedroom, but that was about the only time I saw one except in the Tandy (Radio Shack) catalogue.

Something that may not be obvious now, is that back when music had value, there were numerous shops competing to sell it at different levels.
In the local supermarket they had LPs for just £1 each, mainly on the Music for Pleasure and Pickwick brands. However, the only original artists were ones that were last in the charts years ago. Most were cover versions, sometimes good, usually bad. Interestingly some were done by a chap called by Reginald Dwight, who described what fun it was in a Sounds of the 70s interview.

At the next level we had one shop in Bristol which sold nothing but Greek imports, as they were about 2/3rds the price of UK pressings. They were good quality as well. Finally there were numerous record shops, from the major chains like HMV and Virgin, to a shop near work which was half Newsagents, Half Record Shop. There wasn't much variation on the latest chart albums though, so the main reason for going to different shops was to see what they had. When a group or artist suddenly made it big, finding their previous albums could be difficult. There were also numerous compilation albums from the likes of Ktel which could be good value.

In case you haven't guessed I am a bit passionate about this subject, mainly because by the mid 1990s I reckon my record cassette and CD collection was by far the most valuable item in my house. Getting a second hand CD for £6 seemed like a bargain then. I ended up paying about £20 for Tiffany's The Color Of Silence, which I bought from a very early online store in the USA not realising I would have to pay import duty, and a fee for paying the import duty :-(

Nowadays, I keep seeing CDs I paid over £10 for in Charity Shops or at Car Boot Sales for £1 or less.

Finally, going off topic, a picture from the same catalogue for Mister X.

If you could afford one of these you could afford lots of CDs.
Alternatively you could buy a house for £24000, and not afford any which is what I did back in 1986.

 

FASCINATING! THANK YOU! Fortunately that £24000 house was a much better investment, but I bet it was hard not being able to get the latest music. I remember being unimpressed when cds first came out, vowing to be loyal to my cassettes...at least until I heard one on a proper system. Of course with the rough way we treated them, cassettes were a much better choice in the long run...but that first few plays, before the scratches set in, cds were great!

 

Great album! The right equipment makes all the difference; thanks for the perspective. I wasn't allowed to take advantage of the BMG and Columbia House deals, which at the time seemed ludicrous because they were clearly a phenomenal investment. Did they work out well overall or were most people upset about the value?

 

Yes. A similar house in the same road recently sold for £200000. It shows how difficult it is to give a single figure for inflation.
The Bank of England inflation calculator says that the house should be £69000, a CD album £37, and the top of the range Marantz HiFi £2150 !

I did actually afford the music I wanted, but on LP. CDs and CD players were definitely for the well off, and I didn't get one until 1989. Back to the mid 1980s, I have fond memories of going into work on a Saturday morning doing overtime entering schematics into a £40000 PDP11 based CAD system, then calculating how much extra I had earned and spending it in the afternoon. Another interesting price for comparison was that at work I raised the purchase order for a 10MByte removable disc cartridge to store all our departments CAD work on. That was £100. For people into old computers I just found a video of a similar drive


The size and cost is why there were no MP3 players in the 1980s.

I'm not really sure what the talk of BMG and Columbia House is.
In the UK the Sunday papers often had adverts for Britannia Music club
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britannia_Music_Club
Were they similar ? I was never tempted to join, not wanting the long term commitment to keep buying.

 

New releases? Hardly ever bought any, and when I did, LPs and CDs were around the same price. And I can't ever recall buying a new cassette... except for blanks.

Here's a little fun: On the back of the album jacket for the Flashdance OST is a listing of catalog numbers for all the formats it came on, including CD and 8-track. Yes, 8-track! Which seems kinda weird since 8-track was pretty-much "done" by the time that album was release.

And, here's a laugh... just as cassettes were truly rising in popularity, the first new stereo my parents bought--since marrying 18-years before--had dual 8-track decks. Not the wisest decision at the time, but not the only one they made in regards to consumer goods in my lifetime.

 

I was a mobile DJ in the 80s and early 90s. In the US at that time, it was typical for the cassette version of an album to be about a dollar more than the LP record version. It wasn't always the case...but often. Sometimes, the cassette version would have a bonus song that did not appear on the LP...perhaps to justify the extra $.

 

With a cassette it is easy to fit on some extra tracks without affecting the quality. I have at least one pre-recorded cassette {Susan Vega ?) with two complete albums on it, one on each side. I remember it was advertised as "Two albums for the price of one" and was trying to get a few more sales from a couple of albums that had dropped out of the charts a few years earlier.

 

I've heard tale of such being done. A friend had copy of Pink Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon that oddly included Wish You Were Here. Until he heard the proper album, he thought that song was part of it!

 

I bought this in a local charity shop a couple of months ago for £1 (and only recently found the un-emptied bag it was in).
One reason I bought it was the sticker on the front. £8.99 for a pre-recorded cassette!
I bet the original purchaser didn't forget they had bought it.
The copyright is 1994 while John Menzies sold their shops to WH Smith in 1998 so it was sold sometime between those two dates.

 

This is great!!! Nice time capsule find; the specific dates are helpful also.

 

It's funny you should say that... because the other day, I was pondering if the rise in popularity of tape media pushed the development of Album-Oriented Rock (AOR) in any way.

 

I think this is a real "Best Of" unlike the cheap "Best Of" CDs released by Disky, which usually only featured one or two of a bands biggest hits. There again I bought a "Best of Kim Wilde" Disky CD that included a really good album track that I wouldn't have ever heard otherwise as I have never heard it played on the radio.

As for the order of tracks musicians can sometimes misjudge things. Phil Oakey, the lead singer of The Human League thought "Don't you Want Me" was the weakest track on their album Dare! , put it as the last track on the album, and didn't want it releasing as a single. The record company overrode him and it went on to become the UKs Christmas Number One and their only Number One single in the U.K.

 

I certainly believe that to be the case with Concept Albums, such as the arrangement on the original release of "Music From 'The Elder'" by KISS. But with others, I believe it was more of a "available runtime" question... which leads to edits of unusual length. (Ext. Ver. of "Rockin' In The U.S.A." on the 2nd tape of KISS: Alive II when released on 8-track, 7"-Edit of "Your Latest Trick" on the Dire Straits: Brothers In Arms LP) And then there's arrangement of tracks by popularity, as "Music From 'The Elder'" saw in releases overseas & later-on.