I pulled this Level 42 album out of its sleeve, probably for the first time in 40* years to be greeted by this dire warning!! 
Guilty M’lud!!
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Ah, young person’s music………
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But did it? Hasn’t streaming, mainly Spotify, done more damage?
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No I don’t think it did. I mainly taped albums for use in my car..
I would have thought very few people had tape decks capable of making a decent recording.
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Dunno about that. 40 years ago we had an Aiwa which was quite capable of making good recordings. And the Nakamichis were better. Certainly well good enough for the car. Still got a few of those tapes. Unfortunately the current car doesn’t have a cassette player; indeed it doesn’t even have a CD player. I have to rip my CDs to FLAC on a USB stick to play them in the B&O system in the Audi. PITA!
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I had an Aiwa cassette deck too. It was very good. I meant not many people had anything like that.
I couldn’t afford the Nakamichi, so went for an Aiwa, which I believe were the second best brand at the time.
DG…
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I worked on Hi-Fi Answers in the 70s/80s - we got into serious trouble for a headline repurposing this warning as ‘Home Taping is Skill in Music’ (courtesy of our Assitant Ed Tony Horkins). Intriguingly, our reader surveys seemed to show that people who taped records tended to buy more records than those who didn’t. Not what we were being told by the ‘authorities’. DGP
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Not so bad , could be much much worse.
That looks amazing - I still want one!! 
On the rare occasion that I did tape a friends album it was often a way of making a decision whether or not I liked it enough to buy the vinyl.
While tapes like TDK were good, they often had dropouts and degraded over time.
The BMI were probably looking to find a way to stop what they perceived to be lost revenue. Can’t blame them for that. But whether that was the case, I guess we’ll never really know.
On my one-day-I-will-get-around-to-it list is to repair my Sony TCK611S deck. I think it just needs a new drive belt and a bit of internal cleaning. I still own a collection of cassettes including a couple recent ones that came as part of a bundle purchase.
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My first cassette deck was an Aiwa SD L50; my second was an Aiwa personal cassette player; my third and last was a Sony Walkman Pro. All gave very acceptable results. All have gone now, the Sony is now being used by a friend’s daughter, along with my old UnitiLite. Her dad has created a cracking system for her with RX3s and a Rega 3 alongside my cast-offs. Returning to cassette decks I do have fond memories of mine. I remember making a series of mix tapes for my cycling commute, with different beats per minute for different bits of the journey, one side for the journey to work and one for the journey back. After a while, I had to re-record it as I had got fitter and the tracks put in for the hills were in the wrong place. I then changed jobs, and it was too far to cycle so my fitness level dropped until I took up running. Now, when I cycl,e I wouldn’t consider wearing earphones, so I cycle with just the noise of the environment, and it is probably a lot safer.
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When I bought my first good cassette deck I couldn’t be doing with those fancy new front loaders, and bought this. What a great machine.
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I’d forgotten about those - I always wanted one !! The grey smoked cover was awesome!!
I owned an ADF-660 back in 2021. Absolutely awesome, even today. About £300 quid should get you a serviced one. Many would be surprised at the SQ thru a decent system both Rec and playback. It was a nod towards the ADF-350 I owned back in the day.
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I spent more money than I should have done on a fairly high end three head Nakamichi cassette deck. But eventually the segment of my life that was mostly about children meant that it ended up in the loft.
But attentive forum members will already know that many years later @Richard.Dane rescued it, had it refurbished properly and it now resides amongst his impressive selection of desirable hifi. I’m sure he has posted a photo, but I can’t find it at a quick search.
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Then, as now, very few people had any interest in ‘decent recordings’.
As long as it makes a noise…
Be careful if you ever find one of those Aiwas which has a rotating head (which mine had) i.e. it would auto-run over both sides of the tape. The head used to get frantic and stalled. Lovely machine, but over-complicated, and a repair under g’tee didn’t fix things.
I suspect most taping was for similar reasons, though some definitely was people getting copies if friends’ albums, or even borrowed from a library. But I am imagine the latter may gave been less than people copying CDs, which after all gave no loss of sound quality, and very considerably longer playing life. And then came the original Napster and subsequent online sharing/copying, and now ridiculously low royalty paying online streaming services. Other than the few at the top it is far, far worse for musicians now than it ever was with home taping
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