No one ever said the cassette tape was the best-sounding technology for recording and reproducing music, yet in the 1970s and 1980s, cassettes came to transform how music was produced and consumed worldwide. As a medium for listening to recorded sound, they were inferior to vinyl LPs or, later, CDs, but high fidelity was never their selling point. Rather, as Marc Masters shows in High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape, cassettes had other advantages: they were portable, recordable, easy to use, and cheap. These qualities democratized the means of (re)production of recorded sound. Not since the era of phonographic cylinders could ordinary consumers make recordings themselves, independent of exclusive recording studies and expensive record-pressing facilities. The implications of this were far-reaching.

In conjunction with the advent of several other technologies (the boom box, the Walkman, and the portable four-track recorder), Masters argues, cassettes fueled the emergence of new musical styles and fostered new music communities. Hip hop, indie rock, house, and other nascent genres benefited from the ability to make, copy, and circulate recordings apart from the gatekeeping power of the major record companies. This affordance sparked a revolution in the social history of popular music both in the Anglophone world and far beyond, enabling musicians to make recordings and fans to share recordings as never before. The result was not only the creation of new musical styles but also new kinds of connections, which ranged from the intimate (e.g., making a mixtape for a crush) to the distant (e.g., trading tapes with strangers through the mail). And although the industry did sell millions of pre-recorded cassettes, the most interesting (and consequential) developments occurred either through noncommercial exchange or small-scale economies operating independently of the established record industry.

At its best, High Bias offers an alternative history of music distribution and complicates glib condemnations of music-as-a-commodity. Crucially, Masters shows that thanks to the ease of making and duplicating cassette tapes, a great deal of music circulated through channels other than conventional markets. This music included unauthorized copies of records released by multinational corporations, recordings that were out of print or otherwise inaccessible, and a great deal of music at the fringe of (or outside) the recognized commercial music economies, from low-budget indie records and self-released lo-fi home recordings to demos and bootlegs by well-established artists. The status of musical recordings as commodities was provisional and subject to change. Following Arjun Appadurai, we can appreciate the multiple “regimes of value” in which musical recordings could be involved, some economic and others, away from the market, purely social and cultural. For example, as Masters shows, in the painstaking work of making mixtapes, consumers reframed recordings that otherwise or elsewhere circulated as commercial goods, repurposing them as a resource for personal, sometimes intimate, communication.

As a historiographical intervention, High Bias stands beside another recent book, Rob Drew’s Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable (2024), which covers a lot of the same territory (they even have similar covers). Both writers discuss the music-industry panic over the rise of home recording (allowing consumers to make copies of the commercial recordings they purchased); international tape exchange networks; the curatorial process of mixtape-making; and the impact of cassettes on musical creativity. For all the record industry’s jeremiads in the 1980s that “home taping is killing music,” these authors offer ample evidence to the contrary—that cassettes were in fact generative for musicians and fans alike.

Seen side by side, each of these books has its blind spots and distinct virtues. Masters is a journalist, not an academic, and scholarly readers may be frustrated by the absence of endnotes or the lack of broader historical or theoretical framing. Drew, a professor of communication, however, situates his analysis in the longer history of recorded sound and frames it in relation to important work on “format theory” by media studies scholars Jonathan Sterne and Lisa Gitelman. That said, Masters illuminates the global history of cassette tapes in a way that Drew largely ignores. One of the most interesting chapters of High Bias concerns the cassette cultures of Africa, the Middle East, and East Asia; where accessible, inexpensive cassette tapes sold in stalls in public markets constituted an alternative, ephemeral, hyperlocal music business. In some cases, these cassette cultures have been documented by American collectors and preserved on their blogs and through specialized record labels, catapulting a few musicians such as Omar Souleyman to positions of international acclaim. (Unfortunately, Masters is silent about the appropriative, potentially exploitative dynamics at play in such relationships, which recall the work of (white) collectors of blues records in the 1960s and the complex, often messy history of their relations with aging (Black) blues musicians, as Marybeth Hamilton and others have discussed.)

It is notable too that Masters remains focused on (popular) music, without mention of the roles cassette tapes have played apart from musical entertainment. The global purview of Masters’s book would be enhanced, for example, by considering the important role of cassettes in the Iranian Revolution, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in Saudi Arabia, and the cultivation of heterogeneous pieties in Egypt (which Annabelle Sreberny, Nabil Echchaibi, and Charles Hirschkind have analyzed).

Masters concludes this love letter to the lowly cassette with a chapter about the political and moral economy of cassette tapes in the twenty-first century. Even today, there are numerous cassette labels in operation, run by earnest, committed music-lovers for whom “the hissy, distorted, unpolished tape is a thumbed nose at professionalism and a statement about what art can and should be available” (156). Although they often offer digital downloads of their releases, these modest analog endeavors hearken back to the underground ethics of the 1980s. They are unlikely to cause major ripples in the music industries—and this is just the point.