Can’t say I have much sympathy for the Labels. For DECADES their media was PURE CRAP. Rather than spend 25 cents more for a much higher quality cassette, they went with the absolute worst. So people had to end up buying multiple copies of the same work, simply because they would get destroyed sitting in a car.
What goes around...comes around.
Not only that...they’d put a couple hits in with mostly crap music, so we’d be stuck with mostly crap music. Makes a big diff when we can now be selective of the cuts.
And you couldn't open them up to splice them once the player ate them.
Remember those tangled balls of tape along the roadsides? Sort of like high-tech tumbleweeds.
Those cheapskates did the same thing with pre-recorded VHS tapes.