For the general public there was an emphasis on "Sound Photographs". My Aunt who was a headmistress took her Reel to Reel to London Zoo to record the Real Penguins, Sea Lions etc. I don't know if that was for use in school, her own amusement, or both, I very quickly modified my radio so the speaker didn't cut out when the earphone socket was used made a lead so I could connect that to the input of my cassette recorder. You are bringing back memories here. I marked the radio volume control with the optimum level for recording. No possibility of that with my parents record player though which didn't have any sockets and was probably live chassis. I just had to hope that the noisy diesel engined milk lorry didn't drive past on its way to the Dairy up the road. Something else I have thought about this is what the comparative costs of blank tapes and LPs was. No point in recording something if it is cheaper to buy an LP than a blank tape. I do recall my Father trying to record the "Farewell to the Seekers" concert using his Grundig DC cassette recorder microphone in front of the TV. Nowaday's you can watch it for free on Youtube.
In this region (Netherlands), radio became very popular when the radio pirates came into being. On these stations, the hip music that the youth liked was played. And many parents thought it was bad music. The first radio station started around 1960 from the sea over here. On AM, outside territorial waters. The large amount of radio pirates came to an end around 1990. Interestingly enough, this was the same time that the boombox's popularity began to decline. The heyday of pirate radio was around 1980 over here, on FM. I remember this time well, because it was also the time that I was fanatically recording from the radio. And most of the time from illegal radio stations from here in the city. Probably not coincidentally, this time coincided with the peak of the radio-cassette recorder hype. Anyway, I think there might be a connection between the existence of pirate radio stations and the usefulness of radio recorders. At least over here.
Pirate Radio, cool movie! I just find it strange that even the cheap Hong Kong small R2R's didn't have a radio and they put every gadget know together. Most early radio cassette-corder ads mentioned the ability to record off the radio.
That 1962 ad for the Sony TC-103 was in a religious magazine (De katholieke illustratie; zondags-lektuur voor het katholieke Nederlandsche volk, jrg 96, 1962, no. 42, 20-10-1962). So my guess is that the only user case they could think of at the time was recording church radio. The marketing of the machines and the price were not aimed at young people at all. The market for this application was probably not large, so not many were made. There was probably simply no need/market for cheap compact radio recording devices seen at the time. It was only when the cheaper and more compact machines (1966+) based on the Compact Cassette came along and the products came within reach of young people in terms of price and compactness that the new use case was found by the buyers and manufacturers. Namely recording fresh-cool-hip-new music from stations that were there yesterday and could be gone the next day. I'm just guessing here a bit from experience while collecting so this is far from a scientific study
