That kinda makes me sad
In fact, there is a significant retro scene alone of people collecting and even still writing and believe it or not SELLING games for the C64 and similar computers of the era. Check out Planet X-2 (I think for 8-bit) and Planet X-3 (I think for DOS). They were successful Kickstarter campaigns and shipped in physical form. There are many others too. I watched someone play "Hibernated 1 - This place is death" on an old computer and that game came out recently for a lot of different machines of the era. It's a pretty cool little fandom in my opinion.
They mean not many people will have recorded the sound from this record and then loaded it on to their C64.
I doubt there are that many people who've even heard of this group[0], let alone owned anything anything by them.
While this article is interesting, and something most people, including me, didn't know about, it's not something that was just discovered. The group's own label told people to look for a "hidden message", and gave a new computer to the guy who found it first.[1]
As terrible as the 1541 was, it was still better than the touchy unreliable tape drives of the day, which were generally just cheaply built audiocassette players. It was a factor in making the C64 so dominant in its era.
I think this was true for the American market.
However in Europe (and I believe in Australia as well) tape was the main medium people would have used. Certainly when the C64 was being marketed towards children as late as the early 90s, it was being sold as a cheap games machine and came with the trusty datasette.
I don't think that it was until the Amiga 500(and of course the Atari st) where the disk format really took off for the home market this side of the pond.
For quite a while, I only knew of one household in addition to mine which had a 1541 to go along with it - when I wanted to, ahem, exchange evaluation copies of software with friends, I had to copy it onto tape.
IIRC, a 1541 retailed at 2/3 of the price of a C64. You could buy an awful lot of tape for the money you saved on going with a tape drive instead.
That doesn't match my experience. Fewer than half of the C64 systems I encountered had disk drives, and all of them had tape drives. Turbo Tape was the most common software in use.
But instead of reading the files off an actual tape, they're store on MP3 players, or voice recorders.
There are even programs, like the ones in the PET era, that will speed up the audio so that the "tapes" will load faster.
If a Pet Shop Boys recording was off a few percent, it wasn't a big deal. But if you were loading a program, you'd get errors if the speed drifted too far from spec.