world goes digital

recently i've been thinking about my tapes' collection, what kind of music i have on my cassettes and whether i will be ever again able to listen to them.

today i've read an article about dying cassette-generation in a polish online newspaper that i usually read. there are a few interesting facts in it, like that
Currys company in the UK announced yesterday that they've stopped selling tapes already and that tapes players will only remain in their outlets till the end of this year. another popular electronic equipment seller, Woolworths, stopped selling them totally some time earlier.
the article reminds launch of a cassette by Philips in 1963, and an introduction of walkmen by Sony in 1979. cassettes' big-time was in the turn of the 80's and 90's. the authors say that during socialism in Poland it was only possible to buy foreign good-quality tapes in famous Pewex shops, where you could also get other goodies "from abroad" from.
statistics say that there were 83 million cassettes sold in the UK in 1989 and only 53 million in 2001. to compare with Poland - 10.3 million in Poland in 2001 and only 100 tousand in 2006.
Polish EMI stopped recording music on tapes more then two years ago. however people are still able to purchase cassettes online, in a polish equivalent to e-bay and other online stores that specialise in selling alternative music, mainly with punk, hc and reggae. they've also stopped producing tape records and they only sell their old collections.
a similar story applies to VHS tapes and floppy discs..
and they only mention Europe. i imagine that the process occured in some Asian countries like Japan and South Korea aaaaages ago!
the full lenght article in polish language is available here:
http://gospodarka.gazeta.pl/gospodarka/1,68367,4116273.html

my little cassettes' collection is waiting to be soon exported back to Warsaw. i have about two times more tapes there. i wonder what to do with some of my music that i would still like to listen to?.. just to let you know, the tape part of my tape and cd-player died about 2 years ago, and i don't intend to buy a tape-player again. and even if i change my mind, it will probably not be possible to get one from the shop. and i am not worried about albums that i can still get from a shop or the internet, like Nirvana or The Prodigy,but about those precious pearls like minimal-techno sets of dj's Słowik, Dreddy and Gigi and other memorable stuff recorded by me from old-good Radiostacja... ;_) i have affinity especially for those my-hand-beautified cassettes ;)

do click on the picture for a full impression

do u remember this old-timer?!
i brought them with me to London in 2003 and have only used them a few times in some of London's sordid and old-fashioned internet cafes ;P