Rob Drew

Jun 21, 2024 | thepenngazette.com | Rob Drew

On the unlikely revival of cassette tapes. By Rob DrewIn the late 2000s, a spate of stories appeared in major news outlets offering tips for music collectors who couldn’t bear the thought of their old cassettes being dumped in landfills or incinerated into toxic smoke. Cassettes presented a challenge for recyclers due to their varied and intricately connected parts.

May 21, 2024 | razorcake.org | Rob Drew

Professor Rob Drew’s book Unspooled may be an academic tome, but concerns something that many a music fan can relate to: the cassette. This media format made a comeback in recent years, and the author capitalizes on that by telling their history and what they symbolize. The book begins in the mid-twentieth century and tells how magnetic tape went from being primarily reel-to-reel and then into a compact form. Much of that discussion is centered on the threat the recording industry saw from piracy.

Feb 8, 2024 | dukeupress.edu | Rob Drew

How the Cassette Made Music Shareable Listen to the accompanying playlist on Spotify. Book Pages: 232 Illustrations: Published: March 2024 SubjectsMusic > Popular Music, Media Studies > Media Technologies, Cultural Studies Well into the new millennium, the analog cassette tape continues to claw its way back from obsolescence.

Feb 7, 2024 | ir.shareaholic.com | David Pike |Marc Masters |Rob Drew

Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music ShareableDuke University PressHigh Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape University of North Carolina PressThe cover of Professor Rob Drew’s new book, Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable, is perfectly suited to its topic: a stack of cassette tape cases with a broken tape on top spilling its magnetized guts over the side of the stack.