In today’s era of streaming and YouTube where we as consumers have the power to pick and choose the songs we listen to and curate our own playlists, the idea of a homemade mixtape is either quaint or completely alien depending on how old you are. Go back just a few decades in the UK though and you’d find heavy-handed warnings in almost every cassette tape sleeve telling you, quite matter of factly, that “Home Taping Is Killing Music” with the qualifier, “And it’s illegal”.
This oddly aggressive morality campaign, which seems to repeat itself any time a new medium is developed in the entertainment industry despite these campaigns universally failing to accomplish anything, was launched in this case as a direct result of the introduction of blank cassette tapes. Specifically, the campaign was launched by what was then known as the British Phonographic Industry (henceforth shortened to BPI) on October 28th, 1981 on behalf of basically the entire British music industry. (The BPI is a trade association that represents nearly every record label and thus nearly every musician, in the UK.)
While the technology to record or copy music onto a blank tape had existed for some time at this point, a cheap, consumer-friendly version of the technology wasn’t readily available in the UK- or, at least, it wasn’t until a man called Alan Sugar came along in 1981. Sugar, a business magnate strongly linked to the British technology sector, saw, according to his autobiography, “a Sharp-brand twin cassette deck” while travelling through Tokyo. The cassette deck, which was being sold in a store selling professional grade musical equipment, could copy inserted cassette tapes onto blank ones, and even record directly from the radio.
Sugar saw this and realised that a cheaper, consumer version of such a piece of technology had the potential to be a huge hit in the UK if consumers realised that it could be used to copy their favourite songs from the radio for the cost of a blank tape, or even copy their favourite hits directly from another tape and share them with friends. The problem was that directly promoting that the new technology could be used for unauthorized copying of copyrighted material would be illegal, which is when he hatched an ingenious idea.
After his company Amstrad had developed a cheap, consumer-grade version of the technology he’d seen in Japan, Sugar personally made sure that the advertising campaign around its launch in September of 1981 specifically mentioned that using it to copy copyrighted material was against the law. In his own words:
I told Malcolm Miller to take the precaution of putting an asterisk beside the picture of the new TS55 twin cassette tower system with its “tape to tape” logo and at the bottom of the advert, in large, bold printing, we stated, “*It is illegal to copy copyrighted material. This machine should only be used to copy material you have generated yourself”…
This was a cheeky tactic. People would read it and think to themselves, “Hey, that’s a good idea! I can use this machine to copy my mate’s Abba cassette.” That was the effect the warning had, yet there was I, keeping within the law, whiter than white, telling people that the product should not be used for that purpose…
Thanks to Amstrad’s device and the countless copycat pieces of technology it inspired, the British public could now make copies of the music they owned and, if they wanted to, copies of music they didn’t own but liked.
This thought infuriated the BPI who quickly countered it’s launch with the aforementioned “Home Taping is Killing Music” morality campaign. Why a morality campaign instead of focusing more on the illegality of it? Well, because home-taping (and the more modern, digital age version of it) was, and still is to some extent, a grey area legally speaking.
You see, the law, which varies a bit from country to country, doesn’t seem quite able to make up it’s mind on whether or not it’s legal to make copies of music you own for personal use. In the UK, for example, a high court decision was made in 2011 and made law in 2014 that made it legal to “transfer files from your own CDs or DVDs onto your MP3 player, your computer or other devices” a practise that had apparently been illegal prior to…
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