When did the record albums fade out and the eight tracks tapes fade in?

Answer 1

Where to start? OK, first, 8-track came out around the late sixties, they replaced the huge bulky reel-to-reel players. Their main attraction was that now you could bring your own music into your cars. The 8 tracks had almost no effect on records, as most of us bought records as our main album, and then bought an 8-track copy for our cars. If you loved the songs, you definitely bought the record, as 8-tracks were always getting eaten by our players. 8 tracks and records existed side by side for a few years until about the mid seventies, when this new thing called cassettes came out. They were small untrustworthy-looking critters that many of us did not take to immediately, until we got our first little cassette recorders and realised that we could record our own songs onto the cassette. Yeah, cassettes were good, but many were unwilling to rip that 8-track out of the dash and invest in a (then) expensive cassette player, so what we bought was a cassette adaptor. There were two basic types; the type you wired into your existing radio with a toggle switch to the cassette player. The other type was a little mutant thing that was basically a small cassette player with a power source/sound source shaped like an 8 track attached to it. You slammed this right into your 8 track player like it was a tape, and it looked like your 8-track was vomiting a cassette player. (Guess which one I had.) For many years all three formats lived happily together, but as the price of cassette players dropped, it became clear that they were the preferred format. They were smaller, so you could store more in your car, and our players ate them less frequently. So by the end of the seventies, 8 tracks began being phased out, by the eighties, they were gone. That left records and cassettes to muddle along until the mid to late eighties when CD's started becomming popular and cheap enough to phase out, first, cassettes, Then by the ninties the records themselves. You know the rest of the story. It was nice chatting with ya'.