Cassingle Culture

Today in Tedium: Individually wrapped goods have their place in a modern society. They ensure you're getting the right amount of an object at a pre-measured size. They can ensure you're not over-indulging. And they can keep things more sanitary. But the best individually wrapped objects make you feel like you're getting more than the sum of their parts, not less. But what if individual packaging just means you're getting less? That brings us to the story of the cassingle, a media format that, rather than being collectible, kind of just highlighted the flaws of the cassette format. Today's Tedium ponders where this great object of the ’90s came from, and why it’s somewhat less lovable than other music formats. Personally, I’m not a fan. — Ernie @ Tedium

Another thing you can credit to the scene that gave us the Sex Pistols: The cassette single. (via Discogs)

The first-ever cassingle was designed as a troll by a music impresario

Malcolm McLaren tried a lot of stuff in his 64 years on Earth, and he got away with most of it. He first gained notoriety for a London boutique that he ran with iconic fashion designer Vivenne Westwood under numerous names, before landing on the perfect one in the mid-1970s: SEX.

The SEX Boutique built a unique-at-the-time anti-fashion style that eventually melded into what we know as punk.

McLaren then used his position at the boutique to develop a key iteration of punk music in the form of the Sex Pistols, which was launched initially with some of the boutique’s employees. They need no introduction, really. He was a key figure in the brash, in-your-face nature of punk music.

Of course, the Sex Pistols didn’t last long, with their over-the-top theatrics and edgy style surviving for less than four years. Their story is best handled elsewhere. But they nonetheless inspired a lot of bands.

By the late 1970s, McLaren was onto the next thing, and that next thing turned out to be new wave music, in the form of Bow Wow Wow. That band, best known in America for its cover of “I Want Candy,” also came out of the scene around SEX, albeit indirectly. See, the band launched with three-quarters of the then-current iteration of Adam and the Ants, whose lead singer Adam Ant, who launched his career with the boutique’s management, would later become a major star as a solo artist.

Those members—Dave Barbarossa, Matthew Ashman, and Leigh Gorman—were joined by a literal teenager, Annabella Lwin, as their singer. Lwin was just 13 when the band released its first single. Her bandmates, while fairly young themselves, were between five and six years older during a period in life when an age gap like that is pretty significant.

With a provocateur as their manager, drama was constant. For example, McLaren brought in another singer, George O’Dowd, just to keep Lwin on her toes. O’Dowd, who went by Lieutenant Lush, would quickly leave the band and start his own much-more-successful band, Culture Club. Yes, I’m talking about Boy George.

McLaren also had the band lean into Lwin’s age in extremely edgy, sexualized ways, especially with some of their album and single covers. (At one point, her mom, offended at one of the covers, nearly got her pulled out of the band and pushed for a police investigation before McLaren agreed to tone it down. That cover, based on a Manet painting, now has a spot in the British National Portrait Gallery.)

However, that was not the case with their first single, “C30, C60, C90, Go!” That was provocative in a completely different way. The song played into the idea of cassettes being subversive, because of their ability to both play and record music. Written by the older Bow Wow Wow members with McLaren, the song is literally about copying songs off the radio onto blank cassettes.

Some sample lyrics:

It used to break my heart

When I went in your shop
And you said my records
Were out of stock
So I don't buy records in your shop
Now I tape 'em all 'cause I'm Top of the Pops-yeah!
Now I got a new way to move
It's shiny and black and don't need a groove
Well, I don't need no album rack
I carry my collection over my back

This was the music industry’s worst nightmare, just as McLaren probably preferred it.

And to underline the point, the song was literally released on a cassette with another song about tape recording, with the other side blank. This, friends, was a cassingle, or cassette single. And it was McLaren’s way of putting up a middle-finger at people who wanted cassette copying banned.

The band’s label didn’t promote the record due to its content, but it was still a top-40 hit in the U.K., one of three in the band’s five-year initial run.

Bow Wow Wow’s biggest hit, ultimately, was the cassingle, which came about just in time for the music industry to catch up to a generation of Walkman owners.

That’s right, we have Malcolm McLaren to credit and/or blame for the rise of the cassingle. And honestly, if cassette singles evolved like this, they might have been worth keeping around. But they didn’t.

This Panasonic device, dating to the early 1970s, is currently listed on eBay for (I kid you not) $7,500.

You probably forgot about this, but multi-tape switcher decks did exist

Consider how jukeboxes work for a second. They pull in different vinyl records, play a song on each, and then swap out the disc easily. This fully mechanical function was easy to pull off with records, because the device was being read off the surface.

Even many home record players used mechanisms to allow listeners to listen to records one after another. 45s were designed to be stacked atop one another in a record player, allowing you to get a pile of singles and play them one after another. (Then you could flip the pile over and play the B-sides.)

Cassettes just didn’t work like that. Generally, you listened to the one or two songs on the device, and you had to go through the trouble of taking them out. The pain of taking out a cassette single was exactly as big a pain as removing a cassette album. It was kind of inconvenient, and sort of shattered the whole Walkman experience to have to keep taking the cassette out of the machine.

Really, the play with cassingles, which were popular with teenagers, was to record them to a longer blank tape and bring that with you instead—you know, as a mixtape. (One thing in their favor, just as with 45s: The singles also included non-album tracks, making them a popular choice with collectors.)

One has to wonder, for example, if the reason many songs, especially in the alternative format, weren’t released as singles in the ’90s had something to do with this quality-of-life dichotomy. Putting a tape in a player took a lot of work in its most popular formats—there needed to be a certain threshold where the convenience of the format matched the convenience of the song length. And cassingles ultimately never matched that. CD singles arguably did, in part because multi-disc CD players (and CD jukeboxes) were common, but multi-cassette players that played more than two tapes were exceedingly rare.

However, they were out there. I know of only a handful, and they’re far from common. Most notable was the Panasonic RS-296US, a device Techmoan called “the pinnacle of mankind's electronic achievements from the early 1970s.” It was essentially a device, built out like a record player, that could play from any of 20 cassettes in a way similar to a slide projector.

A device in a similar vein, the Denon Cassematic, could play 12 cassettes in more of a conveyor-belt format.

Finally, Pioneer later produced a multi-tape deck, clearly developed during the era of the cassingle, that was computerized and more comparable to the CD-changers of the early ’90s in the form of the CT-WM77R, which could play six tapes from a single changer, along with a seventh from a self-contained recorder.

Simply put, these devices were rare—and if they did show up in the wild, reflected the interest of a buyer who clearly wasn’t buying cassingles.

A graph from the RIAA comparing single sales across physical formats. Cassette singles had a few years in the sun, but they never reached the saturation level of the 45. (graphics via RIAA)

According to RIAA data, cassingles ultimately did not live up to the format they replaced

So, the recording industry put all this work into replacing the 45 with the cassingle, and was it really worth it in the end? Arguably, no.

The RIAA’s own data supports that singles in the cassette format never matched the success levels of vinyl. According to data published by the RIAA’s U.S. sales database (helpfully displayed with an interactive Tableau chart, and also helpfully adjusted for inflation), the best year for physical singles was the first year of the chart, 1973, when 228 million units of vinyl singles were sold, representing 37% of the sales volume and 9.4% of the music industry’s revenue that year. The next best year was 1979, during the height of disco, with slightly lower volume but significantly higher revenue ($1.5 billion vs. $1.2 billion). But even in the early 1980s, single sales were still well above what we saw during the cassette or CD eras. The best year for cassingles was 1990, when 87.4 million units were sold. The best year for the CD single, which had more room to sweeten the deal with interactive elements, was 1997, when 66.7 million units were sold.

Financially, the cassingle never reached the 45’s heights, only reaching $648.9 million in sales in 1992, only slightly above the $634.1 million made by 45s in 1986, the year the record industry started considering replacing 45s with cassingles.

Download and ringtone sales in the early 2000s made physical single sales look laughably modest when all was said and done.

The real story of the history of the single hits when you add downloads and ringtones into the mix. Almost immediately, both downloads and ringtone sales outpaced what any of the physical formats had been doing—even at the height of their respective heydays. The convenience factor won out.

In 2012, the peak year for downloads, they earned $2.2 billion, which is more than cassingles made in their first four years on the market. (It took CD singles 12 years to match that number.)

Given all that, it’s clear that if the recording industry were just selling singles alone, it would make no sense to switch the single format from the relatively convenient vinyl 45 to the somewhat annoying cassingle and CD single.

But that’s when you bring CD album sales into the picture, and you see what the RIAA saw when it was suing Napster and Limewire:

That section in orange is all the value Shawn Fanning destroyed thanks to Napster. Good job. (RIAA)

Essentially, here’s why everything came out as an album, rather than a single, in the 1990s: All the money was in albums, and the rise of digital downloads began cannibalizing CDs until the mid-2010s, when streaming services cannibalized every format (except vinyl, which made a modest comeback).

Singles were an important business for the record industry to be in. After all, it allowed them to make money on their loss-leaders, the promotional products. But they were small potatoes compared to albums. Given that, you have to wonder if they simply made the experience worse to convince people to spend money on a more expensive format. (Kind of like how Apple charges $1,600 for a MacBook Pro with 8 gigs of RAM and a 512GB SSD, knowing that you’ll want to upgrade that, only to find it adds $400 to the price.) This also explains why compilation albums of recent singles, such as the Now That’s What I Call Music series, became popular during this period.

Physical singles are inefficient. But digital singles? Suddenly, all the downsides become advantages. There was no way cassettes or even CDs could keep up with that.