In the early 1970s, portable cassette players emerged on the market and became very popular. These players used cassette tapes as the storage and playback medium. The quality of the sound was not as good as that of vinyl records, but the players were small, lightweight, and relatively affordable.

In the late 1970s, the compact disc (CD) was introduced. CDs offered much better sound quality than cassette tapes, and soon they became the most popular format for music playback. Although cassette tapes remained popular for a while, by the early 1990s they had largely been replaced by CDs.

However, in …