Except that this was not a logical, nor was it a profitable decision.
The outlay at the company end for a few million good quality tapes would have been marginal compared to rubbish tapes, however if they had used them, and made reasonable quality recordings, they would have recouped that small cost, and probably have sold far more pre-recorded tapes than they did.
Once you have bought a couple of rubbish pre-recorded tapes, and then copied your album or cd on your own better quality tapes on your own home hifi, you quickly realise you are being taken for mug, so you don’t buy any more pre-recorded tapes, and the culutre of home recording increases by on more person who wised up.
The record execs were simply stupid, lazy and greedy, a fatal combination.
When CDs came out in the early 1980’s the writing was on the wall, however many cds were not tranferred very well onto that medium, and in the meantime the quality of home recording devices imporved markedly, record a pristine remastered cd on to a metal tape on a high end casstte machine and you would be hard pressed to discren the differance in a blind test.
At any rate, the market for tapes continued for quite some time after that due to the use of cassettes as in car entertainment - cds did not make much in the way of inroads into this market until well into the 1990’s and by then the mp3 player was already making a cut into the ICE market too.
The Sony Discman was never really a true alternative to the cassette tape due to the high cost and proprietry format, it did find its own niche but it was originally intended to compete with the CD, which it never really did, it was not really meant to replace the cassette which was just so much cheaper and gave you very similar results.
Sony have always had this idea of trying to break formats, wether its DAT or minidisc, something it has tried to do with bluray - but it keeps backing the wrong horse partly because it tries to bleed it for more than its worth - high cost for little obvious gain.
In many ways this shows the beauty of the MP3, which is an elderly concept these days, but its open standards allow it to keep up, its cheap and the expensive alternatives are not discernably any better at the consumer end.