I hope we all appreciate the "hackability" of cassette tapes. Even as a young kid I was able to use the family Hi-Fi to record my own cassettes where I could mix together sounds from a microphone, vinyl, CDs, the radio, etc. Literally any signal I could send through the stereo jack. I often think of one of my first programming books detailing how to save your BASIC programs to a cassette tape - though our family computer had no such attachment.
I don't have quite the same memories from my later days of MP3s and ripping / burning CDs.
edit: I've noticed hexagonal pencils seem to be less common than circular ones now, and I can't help but feel it's because they just aren't as useful anymore.
Another kind of hackability: There is a whole little music genre called "tape loops" where people make music by cutting open cassettes and taping the ends of the tape to make infinite loops. You record onto a few of those of different lengths, play them back in parallel and get neat rhythmic effects as the loops go in and out of phase with each other.
One of the great pioneers of electronic music, Delia Derbyshire, part of the equally pioneering BBC Radiophonic Workshop, hacked reel audio tapes and machines in the way you describe and much more, to create her sounds. She was so OCD in doing so that it was a bit damaging, and may have viewed the later digital synths as a godsend or with disdain. She created the Dr. Who theme.
Speaking of creativity, the Beatles famously used a tape-based keyboard, the Mellotron [0]. For instance, in Strawberry Fields Forever, the spooky instrument heard in the introduction is a flute replayed in reverse on the Mellotron [1].
My Dad was a consumer audio technology enthusiast at the time so we always had the latest (CD then minidisc). There was a weird doldrums period between the release of the CD and Napster (iPod even) for creating and sharing music and mixtapes. It seemed that we would be stuck in a perpetual 5-10 year new technology release cycle. Cassette tape remained the best way to share music as CD burners were not readily available and hardly anyone used minidisc.
Analog copying, those were the days. Specifically, the days of not being able to use my computer or my minidisc player for a solid hour, lest stray noises from apps or excess CPU usage goof up the audio going from one to the other. And then there was the separate joy of twiddling the little wired remote to title the newly written tracks...
NetMD solved this, allowing for digital copying and titling via USB, but it came along so late (2001) as to make no meaningful difference - especially in the face of the iPod, which had its advent in the same year.
Yeah, the main shift from cassettes to copying CD's to downloading MP3's to where I am now, Spotify, has been one of quantity.
I had a few tapes, often re-recording over them with whatever CD my brother bought (he paid money for them, the fool!). Later on I had a stack of burned CDs that I accumulated over the years, once again mostly copied from my brother; during my paper rounds I would flip between the handful of CD's I had.
Then I got an iPod Mini and permanent internet, and my daily listening habits broadened a bit.
And I listen to the most and broadest range of music ever thanks to Spotify. Mind you, its algorithms do tend to steer me to the same things regularly. At least when I had all of my music in itunes I would know what I had and liked better.
Oh for sure. I'm don't think I'd want to give up today situation. The ability to discover new music, get so much of it on demand, podcasts, etc. Just wonderful. I suppose I just appreciate, as a hacker, the very flexible abstraction of being able to take anything through the stereo cord, and record it with the play, pause, rewind, and record buttons. I was able to do so much as a 7-year-old. It seemed more complicated to learn digital sound editing software, CDs weren't always so rewritable, etc.
I don't have quite the same memories from my later days of MP3s and ripping / burning CDs.
edit: I've noticed hexagonal pencils seem to be less common than circular ones now, and I can't help but feel it's because they just aren't as useful anymore.