Cassette tape
magnetic tape recording format for audio recording and playback
The cassette tape, officially named the Compact Cassette, and also known as audio cassette, or simply tape or cassette, is an analog magnetic tape recording format for audio recording and playback. Invented by Lou Ottens and his team at the Dutch company Philips, the Compact Cassette was introduced in August 1963, and Philips freely licensed the patented format to other manufacturers from 1966.
Cassette tapes come in two forms, either containing content as a pre-recorded cassette (such as a Musicassette), or as a fully recordable "blank" cassette. Both forms have two sides and are reversible by the user. Although other tape cassette formats have also existed—for example the Microcassette—the generic term cassette tape is normally used to refer to the Compact Cassette because of its ubiquity.
The Compact Cassette format was initially developed for dictation purposes. When Dolby B noise-reduction technology started to become commonplace in the mid-1970s, reducing tape hiss, the cassette became suitable for high fidelity audio, leading to it being widely adopted by the music industry. From 1983 to 1991, the cassette tape was the most popular audio format for new music sales in the United States.
Cassette tapes contain two miniature spools, between which the magnetically coated, polyester-type plastic film (magnetic tape) is passed and wound—essentially miniaturizing reel-to-reel audio tape and enclosing it, with its reels, in a small case (cartridge)—hence "cassette". These spools and their attendant parts are held inside a protective plastic shell which is 4 by 2.5 by 0.5 inches (10.2 cm × 6.35 cm × 1.27 cm) at its largest dimensions.
The public source identifies “Cassette tape” as magnetic tape recording format for audio recording and playback. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Cassette, tape and magnetic.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q149757. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1963, 1966, 1983 and 1991.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cassette tape” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.