ENARADA, Bengaluru, February 12, 2016
By Guruprasad
The cassette tapes which had become history with the introduction of CDs, DVDs and Blue Ray, is now back in demand!
The audio cassettes which were popularly known as Compact Cassette or Musicassette are now selling now like hot cakes, thanks to the innovation of our farmers! Ironically, theses cassettes which were once providing music to ears is now turning as noisy irritants to scare birds feeding on crops.
Hence, the farmers are removing the tapes and fencing it around crops. Whenever the breeze blows, these tapes tend to vibrate with the air and thereby create noise which scares the birds!
The tapes are woven around plants. When a bird touches the tape, it creates ripples and the scares birds fly away. Photos by www.enarada.com
[hr]
One of the pioneers of ‘taped scare crow’ innovation was KB Suresh, who owns Sri Basaveshwara Digital Studio at Gandasi in Hassan district.
Suresh, who used to own a cassette shop earlier and had invested hugely for buying these cassettes. However, the arrival of CDs brought down the demand so much so that these cassettes became redundant. So, these cassettes became a liability.
Hence Suresh came up with an idea of informing the farmers about its potential uses. As his experiments of using it as scare crow clicked big time, cassettes got back their demand. Now, farmers line up to buy cassettes along with residents who use it to scare crows while preparing homemade papads.
The vintage tape casettes are back in demand as it helps farmers in keeping away birds.
[hr]
KB Suresh of Basaveshwara Digital Studio has innovated this concept.
[hr]
For those of you who are brought up in the generation of CDs, DVDs and Blue Rays, let us introduce you what a taped cassette meant? It was a magnetic tape recording format for audio recording and playback released by Philips in 1962. Compact cassettes came in two forms; either already containing content as a pre-recorded cassette, or as fully recordable “blank” cassette. It was designed originally for dictation machines, but improvements in fidelity led the Compact Cassette to supplant the Stereo 8-track cartridge and reel-to-reel tape recording in most non-professional applications. Between the early 1970s and the early 2000s, the cassette was one of the two most common formats for pre-recorded music, first alongside the LP record and later the compact disc (CD). However, sales of cassettes declined sharply. For example, the cassettes which used to sell 442 million in 1990 came down to 2,74,000 by 2007. Another record low was registered in 2009, with 34,000 cassettes sold. Most of the major U.S. music companies discontinued production of cassette tapes by late 2001.
