Nearly 30 years ago, I walked into Tower Records in the East Village and heard a version of the future. It was in the form of a mixtape. Specifically, a professionally made mixtape.
Tired of dubbing songs off my vinyl records and the radio, caught between the tape age and the CD era, I was intrigued when I heard about a new service at record stores called Personics. You would go into a listening booth and peruse 3,000 popular songs dating as far back as the ’50s before purchasing individual singles (each priced from 75 cents to $1.50) for your own custom mixtape up to 90 minutes long, made in just five to ten minutes. Many of the songs were out of print on vinyl, not yet available on CD; the first Personics tape I made was comprised of pop singles from the late ’70s and early ’80s that, by the end of the decade, were mostly out of mind: Robert John’s “Sad Eyes,” Pure Prairie League’s “Let Me Love You Tonight,” Sheena Easton’s “Telefone (Long Distance Love Affair),” and Kajagoogoo’s “Too Shy.” What the tape lacked in homemade charm it made up for in its near-CD-quality sound and professionally-printed sleeve. On a recent playback, the tape held up, too.
Though the mechanics differ, this a la carte, song-driven concept is one that iTunes Store was built on, 13 years ago. Like some of today’s topstreaming services, Personics had some of the major labels backing it. But the company wasn’t able to sustain momentum, folding in the early ’90s due to a lack of universal music industry support. Without the cooperation of the labels, the Personics’ catalog just couldn’t compete, particularly as formats shifted. But the idea was a good one.
Charles Garvin founded Personics in 1983, when he was 30 years old. The idea came to him while he was taking a shower one day. A Rhodes scholar and a graduate of Harvard Law School, Garvin previously worked for a management consulting firm. “At the time, albums were really the only practical way to get music,” Garvin tells Pitchfork. “I would find myself often either buying an album for one particular cut or more often not buying an album because there was only the one cut that I liked. It struck me that with the technology that was developing, there was something we could do about that.”
Though the format was tape, the technology that drove Personics was the CD. “We reworked the compact disc jukeboxes so that we put two 60-disc jukeboxes together, with all the machines designed to run faster,” Garvin explains. “Since the dominant recordable medium was the analogue cassette tape, we also had to have a specialized deck that we built with Nakamichi, one of the major tape transport suppliers. It also had to work fast and yet have the noise reduction to result in a high-quality product. We involved a number of corporate partners and created a system that I think was well ahead of its time.”
Garvin and his team raised venture capital in several rounds, resulting in a $25 million investment into the startup. Among Personics’ major corporate backers were Warner Communications, whose subsidiary record labels consisted of Warner Bros., Elektra, and Atlantic; and Thorn-EMI, the parent corporation of the Capitol and EMI labels. “We thought that it was very important to get the record industry involved right from the get-go,” Garvin says.
In 1988, Personics launched in 25 record stores across California, attracting coverage from Rolling Stone, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times. By 1990, there were approximately 200 record stores across major cities that carried the Personics service; by the following year, the company filed for bankruptcy protection. While Warner and Capitol-EMI had signed on, the other major labels weren't fully committed. “There was no label that ever got down to releasing music to us within a few months of release,” says Garvin. “We tended to get older catalog material, and we tried to make good use of that. But in the end, the record business is a hits business. If you don't have the hits, then you can't really sustain an operation.”
One look inside the May 1990 issue of Music Makers, the free monthly magazine that Personics published, proves Garvin's point. There’s no MJ or Janet, Bruce or U2, Madonna or George Michael. Only a few tracks from Prince and Phil Collins. No heavy-hitters like the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, two acts that held out a long time when it came to digitally selling or streaming their large catalogs. But what Personics lacked in the big pop acts, it made up for in emerging artists (like Nine Inch Nails) and solid genre listings (rockers like the Cure and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, rappers like De La Soul and Queen Latifah).
The music industry was fearful that the service would cannibalize album sales at a time when illegal home-taping reportedly accounted for $1.5 billion in revenue losses. But Garvin says there was evidence of much more business to be had from people who weren’t ready to shell out $20 for an album but would pay a dollar for a single; the iTunes Store, particularly when paired with the iPod, proved this. “The other thing that we knew is that a lot of people were not paying at all and still acquiring the music through home taping, but they didn't want to do that. By having that happen in an automated fashion, we could subtract from home taping much more than we subtracted from the net amount of music sold in physical records.”
Home taping as a mass problem seems almost quaint now, in the aftermath of file-sharing. After the record industry’s business model basically collapsed, it’s not hard see why the majors would be open to making deals with Apple. Garvin says it goes beyond that, though. “They [Apple] had another way of making money because they could sell the iPod, which was mostly used for illegal content. Where we were trying to work within the system, Napster and later iTunes worked outside the system.”
After Personics, Garvin returned to the corporate world and became a principal at Palisades Associates, a merchant banking firm that helps troubled businesses. Currently he focuses on biotechnology. “I try not to look back,” he says. “We did the best that we could. I was very proud of the team and what we were able to achieve at a time when most of the industry was hostile to us. It's important for entrepreneurs to look forward and not back.” Of course, he still has a few Personics tapes hanging around. Like mine, they still sound great.