POP MUSIC : Will Cassettes Go the Way of the Vinyl LP?

“Vinyl is dead” seems such an obvious fact in the pop world that it’s hard to believe that it was only five years ago that the big plastic LP began disappearing.

But the latest sales figures from the Recording Industry Assn. of America now have some pop fans wondering whether all the fascination with compact discs isn’t going to give us a new truism: “Cassettes are dead.”

According to the association, the percentage of album dollars spent on compact discs in the United States is rising dramatically in the nearly $7-billion a year record industry.

The breakdown for the last three years:

1988--18.6% for CDs vs. 60.4% for cassettes

1989--35.9% for CDs vs. 50.4% for cassettes

1990--42.5% for CDs vs. 48.4% for cassettes

And the new association figures for the first half of this year indicate that for the first time a higher dollar volume of CDs than cassettes was shipped to retailers: $1.89 billion versus $1.37 billion. (CDs are usually priced higher than cassettes.)

Industry experts attribute the shift in consumer allegiance to the better sound, greater durability and ease of programming of CDs.

“The configuration of choice these days is obviously the CD,” says Jason Berman, president of the Washington-based trade group that compiled the statistics.

But he stops short of suggesting that cassettes are soon to go the way of vinyl--though he does see a continuing decline.

The vinyl album disappeared, Berman says, because it could not compete with the superior home audio experience delivered by the compact disc. But most consumers who purchase albums on cassette listen to them in cars or on portable Walkmans--not at home, recording industry surveys suggest.

Although sales for CD car and portable players are on the rise, few industry analysts expect them to overtake rival cassette players soon.

“Have you ever tried to jog with a portable CD unit?” asks Pete Howard, editor and publisher of ICE, the nation’s largest CD newsletter. “Unfortunately, it skips all over the place. At this point, the portable CD unit just can’t compete.”

But the continued use of cassettes for these purposes doesn’t necessarily mean that people will continue buying prerecorded tapes. Given the attractive features of the CD, more and more fans are buying new albums in a CD configuration and then making cassette copies of them for the car and the portable units.

Still, the record industry believes that prerecorded cassettes may be headed for a comeback.

Next year, Philips, the Dutch electronics giant, will introduce the digital compact cassette (DCC) machine, an affordable high-tech unit that boasts CD-style audio specifications.