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As a popular format, reel-to-reel recorders never succeeded the way cassettes eventually would. Unlike the luxury 'hi-fi' units associated with vinyl, cassette players were inexpensive and portable. By the mid '70s, the music industry began to notice that sales of cassettes had begun to outstrip the LP. Something in our relationship to music was reasserting itself.

While consumer copying is derided as near-piracy, the home taper was, and is, closer to Varse than to a crime lord. Businesses create technology, but the consumer decides what technology succeeds. From device to device, what proves successful is what lets us in. It was the cassette, after all, and not compact discs that supplanted LP sales. That fact reveals not just our love of music but also the more complex desire to learn, mimic, and add our own imprimatur to culture. For some people, making a mix tape was the simplest and most effective expression of this.

'Trying to control sharing through music,' writes Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore in his recent book Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture (Universe, 2004), 'is like trying to control an affair of the heart.'

Moore argues that the mix tape spoke to our desire to be understood. It could be a love letter made of musical quotations; it could be a tool of cultural indoctrination between friends. With collaged covers, intricate labeling, and song selections whose secret meanings had to be divined by friends or paramours, mix tapes were something between folk art and a primitive network, personal and public at the same time.

In Off the Record (Rutgers University Press, 2000), historian David Morton describes home taping as 'ordinary people retaking a role, however minor, in determining the ways they receive commercial musical culture'-a role he notes was challenged as early as 1982, when the record industry lobbied for surcharges on blank tapes and began to experiment with anticopying technology encoded on vinyl LPs. Counter_lobbying by equipment manufacturers scuttled those plans, and a landmark court case upheld a consumer's right to copy for personal use. The defendant in that case, settled in 1984, was Sony, which fought a coalition of Hollywood studios over the recording function on its Betamax player. Sony found itself a defendant again in 2005, this time in numerous lawsuits for including an anticopying virus on compact discs released by its music subsidiary Sony BMG. The music industry had believed the compact disc to be its savior, embracing it both for superior sound quality and because, for almost a decade, consumers could not record to it. Not until home burners became affordable did the industry renew its battle against its own customers. It's a process that seems eerily looplike: When a format proves too popular for the music business's 19th-century mind-set to comprehend, that format is jettisoned for a newer, more controlled one.

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