Hobby electronics in general was popular, judging by the number of magazines which were available, as was 'HiFi'. Photography is perennial and in fact Amateur Photographer magazine has been published weekly since 1884. These kinds of hobby activity were also served by local clubs all over the country where enthusiasts met in person, and in many cases they still do.
All of these pastimes make their followers prone to GAS - Gear Acquisition Syndrome - to some extent, and the adverts in specialist magazines reflect the importance of the enthusiast market to manufacturers and retailers. I enjoy browsing though these kinds of publications on the World Radio History website, because they are always full of ads:
Yesterday I was thinking about the popularity of audio recording as a hobby. I'd heard of tape recording clubs in the 1950s and '60s, and I quickly found archived PDF copies of a UK magazine, Amateur Tape Recording, which was published monthly from 1959 to 1967, when it merged with HiFi Sound Magazine:
Amateur Tape Recording magazine archive
What really interested me was how technical some of the articles were, involving quite a lot of electronics and audio theory, alongside features about recording sounds of nature or city streets, documentary making and interviewing techniques. Near the back there is club news, and the number of local tape recording societies is quite amazing. Of course many pages are devoted to adverts, and right through to 1967 the machines featured are reel-to-reel tape recorders from a range of manufacturers. The entry-level price in the mid-60s appears to be around £60, which represents about 3 weeks average wages at the time.
The slightly surprising thing is that the compact cassette doesn't feature in this magazine at all, as far as I can see. OK, Philips didn't licence the technology to other manufacturers until 1966, but I wonder if the tape recording enthusiast didn't see the cassette as a serious option. Perhaps quality and showing some semblance of a professional approach meant that reel-to-reel continued to be what everyone wanted.
What does appear very often is discussion of the forthcoming availability of video recording equipment, especially from around 1965, which seems to have caused great excitement. Letters to the editor include appeals to other readers for copies of recordings of TV programmes the correspondent hadn't managed to capture, and technical articles about video became quite common. My parents didn't get a video recorder until around 1982 or thereabouts, so it's striking how far ahead of the domestic market real enthusiasts were. I suppose they always had been.
The other surprising thing is that this wasn't the only tape recording hobbyist magazine being published in the UK during the 1960s, there was at least one other one, so I assume there were a lot of people doing it:
https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Tape-Recorder-UK.htm
By the way, the World Radio History website looks very homemade, quite Web 1.0, like the kind of enthusiast sites we all remember from the '90s. But it's actually an amazing resource - thousands of magazines, books and other technical publications.
Email: kdan01 [at] posteo [dot] net