At the time, walkmans were trending: people would use recording devices to record the song if it played via the radio or at a concert. You would know at least one friend who has a legit copy (vinyl or cassette) “borrowing” that for the purpose of pirating music, in which that finished recording is replayed on a walkman to listen.
The invdividual uses a voice recorder, the ones with cassettes to store audio but what could happen is that you can capture other audio cues irrelevant to the song (door opening or people speaking in the background). It’s kind of volatile in that sense, unless you are in a room that’s dead silent and soundproof capturing the audio.
tape to tape recording (aka dubbing) was a thing. It would be done in real time unless your deck had high speed dubbing, but that often resulted in a slightly poorer quality.
You could also record direct to tape from radio, LP, or CDs, so not sure why the microphone and background noise thing is an issue. Even before dual decks you could have separates where you could plug the output from one unit into the input of another.
Duplicating tapes from sources was a thing in the 80s for sure.
Haha is that a Dead Kennedys tape? Jello is the fucking man
One of my favorite tshirts from the era had the Alternative Tenacles logo (the bat thing lower right) and said: “Home Taping is Killing Record Industry Profits… Killing Ain’t Wrong”
The AT logo is how I recognized it! I’d know that freaky lil bat anywhere
You betcha it is!