Currys to cease stocking cassettes

The end of the road for cassette tapes has been widely heralded as Currys, the UK high street electrical heayweight, announced today that it will no longer be dealing in the classic storage format. Woolworths and HMV have already made the move. Cassettes were something of a cultural icon to many, though perhaps never as …

[Anonymous Coward]

Cassette luvin'

A former girlfriend made me a mix cassette as recently as 2000. (-: The next mix came on a mini-disc though!

[Anonymous Coward]

Music is killing Home Taping!

Oh, the irony...

[c price]

Currys pull free publicity coup again

Great, so Currys/Dixons have managed to get a load of free publicity by announcing to big fanfare the death of a old format.

By my reckoning that's at least the third time they have pulled this stunt, having previously anounced the death of floppies and VHS.

Looking at the Google news link shows how many journos have bought it. I'd moan about lazy journalists, but I can't be bothered....

[Sean Aaron]

It's true...

I made one or two mix-tapes for paramours, but mainly did them for myself. I was of the LP is reference; tape is for listening crowd.

I've since moved on to MD. I'm sure some company somewhere will make them for some time. I'm sure you can still by recording reels, so the demise of the cassette is definitely premature, although I haven't used one myself for over a decade.

[Steve Bones]

Ah memories

I still remember with fondness my mates and I going into computer stores to buy Amstrad 464 games plus an equal amount of blank cassettes ;-)

[Glynn Williams]

Mix Tapes

Mix tapes were all the rage when I was at school... And the John Cusack film High Fidelity also makes use of them (and Top 5's too!)

[Anonymous Coward]

Pah

The cassette tape is dead on the high street. I still have some Ferric C90s with some Commodore C64 games on them. Ah, the good ol' 80s...

[Vernon Lloyd]

Does that mean.....

...that I will have to replace my well used tape drive car stereo :-( for a more modern one..........

Oh well I might just come out of the stone age......

As for Dixons/Curries, I have boycotted them for the last 7 years due to the rip off attitiude/poor customer service/naff technical support/etc/etc/etc/etc. Oh ever since I stopped working for them.........;-)

[Mr D]

Sean Aaron's Comment ....

So If you made the mix tapes for you..... was this part of some ritual you had for wooing your good self prior to some good old self loving?

Seems a bit more time consuming than painting your left hand nails cheery red (number 6) and sitting on it for ten minutes till you cant feel it .... But hey ... what ever floats your boat ...

[c price]

RE: Death of music?

Just listening to the charts will tell you that it was killed a long time ago. I'm not convinced that home taping was guilty though...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, they still stocked them?

C30, C60, C 90 -- gone?

(apologies to old X-Ray Specs fans)

[Ian Ferguson]

So what next for Currys?

I'm betting Curry's next 'death of' press release will be in exactly six months, announcing the death of camera film.

I do still have occasion to use cassette tapes at work - for the sole purpose of providing information to blind customers. A cassette tape is logical to use (essential for elderly customers), easily to handle, and can be stopped, ejected and started later from the same position, which CDs, minidiscs and MP3s cannot.

I would personally prefer they subscribed to our podcast, but until somebody makes a elderly-friendly and blind-friendly MP3 player, there'll always be this minority demand for cassettes.

[Anonymous Coward]

X-Ray Spex

"C30, C60, C 90 -- gone?

(apologies to old X-Ray Specs fans)"

Surely you mean "old Bow Wow Wow fans" - and if ever there was a band that appealed to old men, it was Bow Wow Wow.

I wonder when Minidisc will give up the ghost. I can think of a few reasons to keep it around, but not enough to ensure a continued presence in the high street.

[Andy Bright]

Currys sold tapes?

Thought they only sold washing machines and Amigas, whatever is the world coming to..

..damn new fangled shiny disk thing won't stay put on my gramophone..

(ps I lived in the time of Vinyl and it doesn't sound 'warm', it sounds scratchy and always has - and tapes have had it coming for a long time, name one person that doesn't have a shoe box filled with eaten silly string some cassette player has chewed its way thru - death to tapes hurrah)

[James Pickett]

Er...

So, what do they expect you to put in your 'Matsui CD35P Personal Portable CD Radio Cassette' (item no. 767552 on their website) then..?

[Big Pete]

Upgrading

First they made me throw out a perfectly good 8-Track, and buy one of those new fangled cassette players.

Now this.