[Commlist] New book: Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable

We would like to announce a new publication from Duke University Press, 
which we hope will be of interest.

*Unspooled***

How the Cassette Made Music Shareable

*Rob Drew***

*_https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781478025597/unspooled 
<https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781478025597/unspooled>_*

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*Receive a 20% discount online*:**LLS24*

*Valid until 11:59 GMT, 31^st December 2024. Discount only applies to 
the CAP website.

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“/Rob Drew is one of my favorite writers on music, and I wish more 
people knew about his work. This is the definitive cultural history of 
indie music’s tangled but fascinating love affair with the 
audiocassette.”/––David Hesmondhalgh, author of /Why Music Matters/

"/The story of the cassette tape Drew and Masters tell is compelling: 
how a lo-fi, accident- and deterioration-prone, and more-or-less 
parasitic audio technology not only achieved market dominance but 
captured a permanent place in the imaginations and practices of 
music-makers, labels, distributors, and fans the world over.  Unspooled 
and High Bias show readers that the peculiar technology of the cassette 
tape exemplifies the inherent contradictions of popular music perhaps 
better than any other medium./" ––David Pike, /Popmatters/

Well into the new millennium, the analog cassette tape continues to claw 
its way back from obsolescence. New cassette labels emerge from hipster 
enclaves while the cassette’s likeness pops up on T-shirts, coffee mugs, 
belt buckles, and cell phone cases. In Unspooled, Rob Drew traces how a 
lowly, hissy format that began life in office dictation machines and 
cheap portable players came to be regarded as a token of intimate 
expression through music and a source of cultural capital. Drawing on 
sources ranging from obscure music zines to transcripts of Congressional 
hearings, Drew examines a moment in the early 1980s when music industry 
representatives argued that the cassette encouraged piracy. At the same 
time, 1980s indie rock culture used the cassette as a symbol to define 
itself as an outsider community. Indie’s love affair with the cassette 
culminated in the mixtape, which advanced indie’s image as a gift 
economy. By telling the cassette’s long and winding history, Drew 
demonstrates that sharing cassettes became an acceptable and meaningful 
mode of communication that initiated rituals of independent music 
recording, re-recording, and gifting.

*Rob Drew*is Professor of Communication at Saginaw Valley State 
University and author of /Karaoke Nights: An Ethnographic Rhapsody.///



*Duke University Press **| Sign, Storage, Transmission | March 2024 | 
232pp | 9781478025597 | PB | £22.99**

*Price subject to change.

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