As I said before, the inaugural issue of Audio Senka came out in June 1972. In the preceding years, I had been wondering to myself how we should contribute to the industry. Eventually I came to the realization that the industry consists of three players: makers, retail stores, and users. Generally speaking, an industry is thought to be made up of only makers and distributors. But interestingly, by adding users, I realized that their respective roles changed and that a user-oriented stance began to function as the core axis. It was important for media like us to act functionally from this perspective.
If users were to be a part of the equation, first of all it was necessary to create them. Then a market could be formed by adding dealers and makers. From this awareness, I realized that the best way for us to contribute to the industry was to take the initiative in creating a market.
In the spring of 1970, therefore, I declared that this was the “first year of tape” and organized a symposium with the participation of 20 companies related to cassette tapes and audio cassette tape decks. At that time, apart from overseas sales, about the only cassette tapes being distributed in Japan were TDK’s Synchro Cassette Tape brand. But the FM Tokyo radio station had begun broadcasting on April 26 of that year, and the recording of FM broadcasts on cassette tapes was becoming popular, especially among the baby-boom generation.
Aged 25 at the time, I made a long speech at the symposium about the arrival of the cassette tape age and stressed that, rather than companies going it alone, the most important thing was for the industry as a whole to set about market creation. The participating companies agreed with me. The well-known inventor Yoshiro Nakamatsu, who owned related patents, also attended, and I was thankful when he told me that he often read my opinions in the magazine.
Many companies entered the audio cassette tape deck market in 1971 and the cassette tape market in 1972, and the number of products increased. Since cassette tapes played a major role in recording music played on FM radio or from LP albums, these markets kept on expanding. Launched in 1972, Audio Senka, as a specialized magazine of the industry, became the main medium for cassette tape marketing and took the lead in market creation. Revolutions need propaganda, after all. Audio Senka played an important role in publicizing the cassette revolution and in disseminating distribution information nationwide as well.
Then came the oil crisis of 1973, which sparked an underlying tone of energy saving and avoidance of fuel wastage. The storms of recession also hit the audio industry, which became a structurally stagnant business. Since cassette tapes were a petroleum product, I was worried about the impact here too, but companies continued to come out with new products. As a result, in 1973 Ongen Publishing achieved record sales. We still talk about how we were saved by the overall backing of the tape business.
The fourteenth, summer 1980, issue of Audio Accessory, which had started bookstore sales in 1977, included a large-scale compatibility test for cassette tapes and audio cassette tape decks. Because of the huge scale of the test, I named it the “Scramble Test.” This large and detailed test soon became a norm for audio fans and has continued to this day.