An album that fits in your pocket

Several attempts had been made in the 1950s and early 60s at making audio tape accessible to the casual home user, including a commercially disastrous (but technically impressive) cartridge system from RCA in the US in 1958. Dutch firm Philips introduced the Compact Cassette in 1964 and, whilst slow to get taken up by the music industry, taken up it eventually was and in 1966, EMI began to release albums on pre-recorded "musicassettes".

To begin with, EMI drip-fed a small number of high-profile releases to test the market. These would be titles that were big sellers on vinyl, presumably to ensure that the capital outlay involved in setting up and equipping the cassette duplication factories wouldn't make the company bankrupt!

In fact, aswell as gearing up to the production of pre-recorded musicassettes, EMI would also have been preparing for the manufacture of 8-track cartridges at the same time, as the preparatory work for duplicating both of them involved many parallel steps - from the creation of the duplication masters to the preparation of the labels and covers.

  The inlay spines all carried this

  1⅞ ips logo, referring to the speed

  at which the tape was designed to play.

For the first two or three years, cassettes continued to use the terminology previously associated with open-reel tape - i.e. referring to each side as 'tracks'. In fact, this was a misnoma because each side of a stereo cassette has two tracks, so the two sides actually total four tracks.

So to be correct, Side 1's songs should have been headed 'Tracks 1 & 2' and Side 2's songs, 'Tracks 3 & 4'!

EMI cassettes manufactured before the Summer of 1969 carry the message "SOLD IN U.K. SUBJECT TO RESALE PRICE CONDITIONS. SEE PRICE LIST." This message had also been appearing on vinyl records since around mid-1964.

1970 was the year in which EMI cassette and 8-track issuing really began in earnest. This was when EMI embarked on a huge programme releasing back catalogue on tape. For cassettes, there was a slight problem to be overcome as far as album covers were concerned. Album covers are square, but cassette cases and the inlays inside, are rectangular. A very simple template was introduced, whereby the album cover would be reduced to a square at the bottom of the front-facing area of the inlay, with the title and catalogue number in black text on a white background, occupying the rest of the space.

The EMI cassette layout in 1970 was basic to say the least. More in common with newspaper design than the more elaborate practices involved in the production of the vinyl jackets (where most effort was concentrated), cassette inlays were viewed as requiring to be basically functional only.

It is worth remembering that up until around 1971, the back covers of vinyl LPs were created using 'letterpress' techniques, whereby moveable type (pre-cast metal blocks containing the shapes of letterforms, logos and graphic elements like lines, bullets and curves) had to be arranged in a rack to create a printing plate. Usual practice was to make a sub-mould with all the type (and logos and graphic elements) in place, to produce a single stamper which could apply the back cover graphics in one operation and with no risk of individual letters or logos falling out. Any photographs that needed to appear would have to be made into a physical plate using the 'halftone' process in which the images would be converted to a pattern of dots, which could thence be converted into peaks and troughs etched into the surface of the plate. This normally would be black-and-white only. This process was extended to the production of early cassette inlays, with the added complication of having to create halftone plates of the four colours that make up the colour illustration of the album cover. This would be a photomechanical process that would result in four stampers each containing a fine pattern of dots representing areas of the four printing process colours, cyan (light blue), magenta (dark pink), yellow and black. Halftone separations of this era would tend to be fairly low resolution, having what would be termed a low 'screen frequency'. This would be necessary in order to prevent blobbing of the inks or trying to prints dots so fine the ink wouldn't grip the paper during pressing.

If you ever got hold of an EMI tape like the 'Easy Rider' example here, you will be able to hold the inlay up to the light and see the indentations in the paper left by the letterpress - i.e. all the lettering creates a visible 'crater' in the surface.

In line with EMI's marketing policy of the time, valuable inlay space was used to advertise other 'titles' available on cassette. Throughout 1970, all EMI tapes contained such an advertising section on the 'inside front cover'. Many late 1960s EMI vinyl LPs also contained similar sections at the foot of the LP sleeve back covers.

The reverse of the inlays continued to be used for the tracklistings, still for a while headed 'Track 1' and 'Track 2'. Totally superfluous 'matrix numbers' were even allocated to each side (on this example 'T-SSL 5018A' and 'B'). These really meant nothing, because with cassettes both sides are duplicated at once from a single master tape, containing Sides A and B in parallel (in exactly the same arrangement as on the finished cassettes themselves).

Nearly all EMI tapes featured the black box 'EMI' logo introduced by the company in late 1967 plus a second black box 'label' logo underneath (right) - either Parlophone, Columbia, HMV, Stateside, Tamla Motown or Harvest. However sometimes earlier versions of the logos were used (including the earlier 'oval world' EMI logo), and on occasions no logo at all would be present - which could possibly be put down to a lack of sufficient quantities of letterpress blocks for the graphics. Remember that for as many copies of these as were required, they would have to be recast as a piece of metalwork, with of course an associated cost involved.