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.
I had a ghettoblaster with tape-to-tape at some point in the '80s and certainly copied a couple of albums that way - but I’ve never really been into music that much, so it wouldn’t have been many.
Prior to that we did have a horrible old mono tape recorder which I used to record some HHGTTG episodes on it’s original radio transmission by standing it beside the radio and begging the family to be quiet. I may even have those tapes somewhere - for sentimental value. They were appalling quality as you would expect.
I too had a ghetto blaster, which must sound pretty weird to people young enough to have never heard of them.
My folks had a ghetto blaster when I was growing up, and I thought it was a cool name - completely unaware of the racial implications
One day I was talking to a friend who also grew up in the CD era, and the topic steers towards my dad’s ghetto blaster. They grew very concerned and were like, “Is everything okay at home, does your dad have a manifesto, should we call the police or something?”
Even though they definitely knew what a boombox was, they thought I was talking about a TEC-9. I no longer call a boombox a ghetto blaster.