Did you know?

During the 1980s, there was a form of magazine created and published entirely on compact cassette tapes? Similarly to today’s podcasts, these “tape-zines” as they are often called, were formatted like radio shows, with ads and notices of new music, interviews with artists / musicians, and more. They were around 60 minutes, and in most cases, available worldwide. The majority did not last very long, suffering losses due to copyright laws, production costs bringing down self-produced tape-zines, and other issues.¹ Tape-zines like SFX Magazine or Fast Forward could also put more focus on the artists themselves, or bands that were going unrecognized by the mainstream audience. Fast Forward, for example gave more recognition to punk bands in Australia, who were getting very little recognition, especially when compared to American or English punk bands.²

One example of a tape-zine can be found at the following link:
SFX Magazine – Internet Archive

1. “The Rise and Fall of the Audio Cassette Magazine,” Digitalconverters.co.uk, 2025, https://digitalconverters.co.uk/blog/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-audio-cassette-magazine. ↩︎
2. Greg Wadley, “Fast Forward,” Spill-label.org (Spill Label, 2020), https://spill-label.org/fastforward/. ↩︎

– Abby’s test post 🙂