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‘Home taping is killing music’: the recording industries' 1980s anti-home taping campaigns and struggles over production, labor and creativity

In the 1980s, the major record labels in the United States and the United Kingdom publicly confronted consumers over the private copying of music onto blank cassette tapes. Industry trade groups, such as the Recording Industry Association of America and the British Phonographic Industry, mounted publicity campaigns combatting this practice of ‘home taping’, and, in addition, took legal action and lobbied governments for new copyright legislation. They condemned the practice as piracy, even though private, non-commercial copying was predominantly legal. In a significant precursor to the digital file-sharing battles of the 1990s and 2000s, fans and musicians widely objected to these attempts at media control, often through highly creative responses. This article examines these anti-home taping campaigns as a historical conjuncture that reveals some of the ways content firms defend themselves against new media technologies, while also illustrating the complexity and diversity that exist within media industries like ‘the recording industry’ that are too often falsely presented as singular, homogenous groups. This analysis raises important questions about media production, labor, and creativity, in particular how the creative work of audiences is culturally discounted and copyright law is used to define creativity in highly restrictive ways.