[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape#21st_century
Vinyl and tape are also enjoyably tactile.
Indie acts have often gravitated towards CD-R rather than vinyl, because they can burn them at home in small quantities. But for mobile use, a walkman actually beats a discman, in my opinion, due to its smaller size. And, not being digital, cassettes have a kind of built-in "soft" DRM feature, in that reproduction is possible but goes hand-in-hand with a loss in quality. The mixtape / pirating / bootlegging scene helps spread the message about an act, and, if someone truly likes the music, they might go back to the original artist and buy an "official" prerecorded cassette where they get better sound quality, and a reasonable level of expectation that the money actually reaches the artist to support them.
With Spotify, for example, I have no idea, as a consumer, if I listen to a lot of small acts, how much of the money I pay every month to Spotify actually gets into the pockets of those acts, or whether they're just on there because they got arm-twisted into being on the platform because of platform power.
There's a lot that's good about the medium, and that goodness comes in the form of simplicity in engineering, which is a virtue in its own right.
You can assume it is pretty much a rounding error what they get.
I end up with the music, the musician ends up with most of the money, everybody wins.
Not just reproduction. Even just listening to them a bunch goes hand-in-hand with a loss in quality. Unplanned obsolescence?
The physical properties of tape make it much better for socializing than digital files or streaming services because it forces in-person interaction. That's what people were actually enjoying throughout the 20th century, we all just lived in a collective fantasy that it was music that people were after when it wasn't quite that after all.
I remember watching TV shows in the 90s and discussing each episode with friends. It was great.
Or you could rent a video movie and watch it with friends (amortising the cost).
Mix tapes were also great gifts.
I dunno, the tech was technically inferior but it just worked out nice somehow.
At school, me and my bestie at the time would quiz each other on the previous night's episode of Star Trek. How lame we were :]
I recognize, in hindsight only, that every woman I'd dated seriously has received a mix tape from me. Well, in the old days it was a mix tape. These days it's more likely to be a CD or a thumb drive. But it's the same thing in the end.
I think it's a way of revealing a more intimate part of myself. Kind of "you should know who I am, and here is an important part of that" kind of thing.
In visual arts I think there is longer tradition of playing with the imperfections of the media instead of trying to hide them.
But ultimately, trying to reason about art has its limits, not everything can be understood (or at least enjoyed) rationally.
Cassette tape also have that crispy, muffed but hot and softly saturated sound. I also like sometimes to record my synthesizers direct to tape with a Yamaha MX4T (a 4-track cassette recorder).
For some genres that's the point. Most modern black metal is released on cassette tape, to achieve the desired black metal sound.
While I don't miss cassettes I do miss the rituals surrounding physical media. Being able to pick a thing, listen to it, and not being sold on other items.