Today we present a cassette theory mixtape. Three excellent scholars help us understand consumer-focused magnetic tape and its history as a medium for the masses:

Eleanor Patterson, Associate Professor of Media Studies at Auburn, whose new book just won the 2025 Broadcast Education Association (BEA) Book Award and a 2025 International Association for Media and History Book Award. It’s called Bootlegging the Airwaves: Alternative Histories of Radio and Television distribution (Illinois Press, 2024). 

Rob Drew, Professor of Communication at Saginaw Valley State University and a fantastic interpreter of pop culture like graffiti and karaoke. His new book is Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable (Duke, 2024). 

Andrew Simon, Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. We’ve been wanting to talk to him for a while about his 2022 book, Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt (Stanford University Press). 

This conversation winds its way from the early days of radio, through the Anglophone indie rock of the 1980s, and into the streets of Cairo, where cassette tapes represented the first mass medium that Egyptian state power could not control. 

03:49 Introducing the Cassette Theory Mixtape

04:06 Meet the Scholars: Eleanor Patterson, Rob S. Drew, and Andrew Simon

06:10 Diving into the Books: A Round Table Discussion

12:24 Exploring the Prehistory of Media Distribution

23:43 The Role of Cassettes in Indie and Hip Hop Culture

31:12 Cassettes in Egypt: A Tool for Revolution and Resistance

40:32 The Intersection of Media and Culture

Hear the full 90 minute conversation by joining our Patreon! Please support the show at patreon.com/phantompower

Links to Mack’s recent travels:

Residual Noise Festival at Brown University

Resonance: Sound Across the Disciplines at Rutgers University’s Center for Cultural Analysis

Andrew Simon: [00:00:00 ] Cassette tapes and players did not simply join other mass mediums like records and radio. They became the media of the masses. Cassettes in many ways were the internet before the internet. They enabled anyone to produce culture, circulate information, challenge ruling regimes, long before social media ever entered all of our daily lives. 

PPIntro: This is Phantom Power.

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, a podcast about sound where I talk to people who make sound and people who study sound. I’m Mack Hagood. I’m a Media professor at Miami University, and I just want to start off by giving a quick shout out to a couple of creative communities that I got to hang out in.

I [00:01:00 ] just got back from the Residual Noise Festival at Brown University, which was this amazing three day event featuring ambisonic sound, art, and music pieces performed both at Brown and at RISD, the Rhode Island School of Design. The lead curator of the festival was Ed Osborne, who is the chair of the Art Department at Brown, and a very accomplished sound artist.

And in the middle of the festival there was this one day conference and Ed was kind enough to invite me to be the keynote speaker. And then I had an onstage discussion with Emily I. Dolan, the chair of Brown’s Music Department, and someone whose work I’ve followed for a long time, and it was a real thrill to meet her as well.

But really the biggest thrill of all was the sounds, I mean, three days of these immersive ambisonic creations by amazing artists in these amazing facilities, both at Brown and RISD [00:02:00 ] and most importantly, there is just such a creative and fun and diverse and nurturing community of composers and sound artists at these two schools.

I’ll put a link to the festival in the show notes and hopefully. We may also feature some of these artists in coming episodes. And then the week before that I visited the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University, and they’ve been having this two year long sound seminar chaired by Professors Carter Mathes and Xiaojue Wong.

And they invited me to come over and talk to their faculty and grad students and postdocs about my work. And I got to learn about all the fascinating sound related stuff that’s happening over there at Rutgers. That was also a blast. So I just want to thank Carter and Xiaojue and Ed for the invitations and thank all of you for listening because so many people at these events came up to me and said how valuable they [00:03:00 ] found this podcast.

And I never anticipated making so many new friends and working relationships through this show. So I feel super fortunate. And that also reminds me, last episode I mentioned trying to get our Patreon sponsorships up so that I can pay an editor and keep this show going during the summer. And we got an unprecedented upsurge in memberships.

So thank you so much. We still kind of have quite a ways to go for me to reach the break even point on production costs. So please, if you’ve been thinking about doing it, maybe do it now. Just go to patreon.com/phantompower you’ll get all the bonus content from today’s show and all the previous shows.

Speaking of today’s show, let me talk about it. I am calling this a cassette theory mixtape. We have three excellent scholars who have recently published books that help [00:04:00 ] us understand the medium of magnetic tape and it’s history as a medium for the masses. My guests are Eleanor Patterson, associate Professor of Media Studies at Auburn, whose new book just won the 2025 Broadcast Education Association’s book Award and the 2025 International Association for Media and History Book Award. It’s called Bootlegging the Airwaves: Alternative Histories of Radio and Television Distribution Out on Illinois Press. 

We also have Rob S. Drew, professor of Communication at Saginaw Valley State University.

Rob is a fantastic interpreter of pop culture. He’s done work on graffiti and karaoke, and his new book is called Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable out on Duke University Press. 

And we also have Andrew Simon, senior lecturer in Middle Eastern [00:05:00 ] Studies at Dartmouth College, and I’ve been wanting to talk to him for a while about his book, which came out back in 2022. It’s called Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt on Stanford University Press. These three books encounter their subject matter in different historical moments and geographies, and I thought it would be really exciting to sort of bring these great scholars together to discuss the cassette tapes, many purposes and meanings in everyday life.

I should say that Eleanor’s book is not exactly about the cassette tape, but she gives us this really amazing prehistory that I think is very helpful in thinking about the cassette tape. This is also the first time that I’ve had three guests on at once to just sort of have a round table discussion.

So let me know what you think about this format. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. It’s so hard to get people’s schedules together and I managed to pull it off this time. So, let me know what you think. [00:06:00 ] Alright, so Cassette Theory: A Mix Tape. Let’s do it.

Nora. Rob, Andrew, welcome to the show.

Rob Drew: Thank you.

Andrew Simon: Thank you.

Mack Hagood: I am really excited to have all of you with me, I thought maybe we could just start off with each one of you doing a bit of a self introduction and giving us sort of the short elevator pitch of your book before we really dive in, sort of set the stage for us.

And Nora, why don’t we start off with you.

Eleanor Patterson: Alright, well thanks for asking. My book is called Bootlegging the Airwaves: Alternative Histories of Radio and Television Distribution. It’s really a case study look at, on demand listening and viewing and really peer-to-peer file sharing before the Internet with looking at analog technologies, kind of at the birth of broadcasting and radio through the seventies and eighties.

And [00:07:00 ] think that these are stories about the histories of the audience, of fans and the labor they do in distributing content. I’m really a distribution scholar more than anything else, so I’m thinking about how programs get to people and, in what ways they encounter and how those technological, social assemblages shape, how we make sense of content, but also form relationships and make sense of ourselves. And at a few different case studies. Bootlegging is a really hard thing to study, so, won’t say my book is comprehensive, but I look at communities of radio and television fandoms that were, connecting with each other, doing home recording and sharing content really at a time where the only other way to listen or encounter programs was to tune in on a schedule determined by the industry.

That’s [00:08:00 ] the very small version of my book. So I’ll stop there and let the others have a chance. So I’m really excited to hear about the other books we’re talking abo