PlayTape

~ the eulogy ~

The man who made PlayTape also made Cartrivision, and both of them are buried on this site now. Frank Stanton was born in 1921, traded surplus goods around the world after the war, and imported German cars into the United States before he got anywhere near magnetic tape. He put out two consumer formats in two decades and neither of them lived past its third birthday. He died in 1999 in Water Mill, New York, having spent his later years in Manhattan real estate, which is a career that at least stays where you put it.

PlayTape was the first one. He unveiled it at an MGM Records distributors meeting in New York in 1966: an eighth of an inch of tape running in an endless loop on two tracks, somewhere between eight and twenty-four minutes on a cartridge. That is a fraction of what a 4-track or an 8-track held, and the shortfall was the entire pitch. The cartridge was small enough to carry loose and the players were small enough to hold, which nothing else on the market managed in 1966.

It worked for about eighteen months. Motown licensed its whole catalog into the format in April 1967 and Pepsi ran promotions on it, and by early 1968 more than three thousand artists had material out on PlayTape. Then the 4-track and 8-track manufacturers shipped home and portable players of their own. The one advantage evaporated and the American side of the business was over by 1969. Tapes kept selling in Germany for a while afterward, for reasons nobody has ever satisfactorily written down.

This ended fifteen years before I was born and it never had a route into this country at all. Turkey's cartridge era, when it arrived, was the compact cassette, sold off racks in shops that also sold the players, and it ran for the better part of twenty years. PlayTape was already finished by the time any of that started here. There is no local version of this story to tell, not even a late or secondhand one.

~ the dossier ~

~ five colors on the rack ~

The September 1967 consumer launch shipped in five cartridge colors and the color told you what you were buying. Red was a single at a dollar. Black was a four-song EP at $1.49. Blue was children's material, a dollar to a dollar fifty. White was the closest thing to an album, about eight songs, $2.98. Gray was spoken word and educational, priced with the blue.

This is a good idea buried in a dead product. A record shop rack in 1967 had no way to signal length or price at a glance, and Stanton solved it with plastic dye. It also tells you how the format was meant to be bought, which was casually and in small amounts, a dollar at a time rather than as an investment in a library.

~ the only car that took one ~

Players started at $19.95 for a Sears exclusive and $29.95 for the MGM-branded unit with tone controls. Stanton talked about more than fifteen models for 1967, spread across tabletop units and things you carried, with car players on top of that. The car players are where the format lost the war it most needed to win. Car audio in the late sixties was 8-track's home ground and PlayTape never took it.

One manufacturer offered a PlayTape player as a factory option in the United States, and it was Volkswagen. There were two: the Sapphire I, in the dash with an AM radio built in, and the Sapphire II, mounted below the dash with no radio at all. About forty dollars in 1968. Stanton also tried a business version called the Mail Call Letter Pack, recorders under seventy dollars a pair with reusable cartridges in three lengths, the longest of them ten minutes, for sending memos by post instead of typing them. It did not sell either.

~ the same man, the same ending ~

Stanton's next format was Cartrivision in 1972, home video on tape three years before Betamax, with rental movies you could not rewind. It lasted about a year. The pattern across both is not bad engineering. PlayTape worked, Cartrivision worked, and each was first into a category that then filled up with better-funded competitors selling the same idea at more capacity.

What is left of PlayTape is a collector's market and a strange German afterlife. The cartridges turn up in boxes at record fairs and almost nobody can play one, because the players were cheap, disposable and made in small numbers for two years. A format survives on the machines, not on the tapes, and there were never enough machines here to survive on.

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