According to Billboard magazine, some 1,540 million prerecorded analog cassettes were sold throughout the world last year.

The company has played key roles in developing new products, including the analog cassette and audio compact disks.

Similarly, digital cassettes will offer better quality and smaller size than conventional analog cassettes.

Record companies first opposed analog cassettes, though that is now a large part of their business.

Thus, they are totally incompatible with analog cassettes.

Right now, record companies can duplicate an 80-minute analog cassette in one minute.

The traditional analog cassettes will not be affected by the agreement.

The Philips digital cassette machine will also play the old analog cassettes, though not with digital sound quality.

But listeners who own standard analog cassettes already have the equipment to play them.

And once again, a famous rhetorical campaign attempted to argue that the analog cassette was literally destroying an entire industry.