Although cassettes tend to be denigrated now, they were really useful in their day. First you could share music with friends and produce your own compilations of favourite songs, secondly unsigned artists could easily produce their own recordings and sell them at gigs, and thirdly it was the only way you could listen to your own choice of music whilst driving. Having a car with a radio cassette player was great at the time, but eventually they switched over to CDs, making for easier track selection but no home compilations, but now superseded by MP3 or memory sticks in cars. Not sure if that is progress, because you now have to either downstream music or record it in advance onto a stick, which just is as laborious as compiling cassette recordings was in 1980s.