'It was a way to share your musical experiences': why cassette tapes flourished, and still endure

Two new books explore the history of the tape and how it helped spread hip-hop, thrash metal and experimental music around the world one mixtape at a time Everyone who grew up with a tape deck remembers mixtapes, or compilation tapes, as we used to call them in the UK. They remember sitting with a pile of records or CDs, assembling the perfect order, sending the right message. The narrator of Nick Hornby's novel High Fidelity, Rob Fleming, had a set of parameters that had to be observed: "You ca...