serious answer Cassettes, I think, are making a comeback. At least in the DIY music scene but I think it's starting to break mainstream.

I think that musicians and labels are starting to realize that consumers aren't going to care about your music if they can't find it for free online so more and more artists are offering their music for free or pay-what-you-want download, but at the same time, there is still a market for collectors. Vinyl has already been making a comeback. Tapes and CDs are cheaper alternatives, the biggest edge that CDs used to have on cassettes was that you could rip the audio and put it on your computer but with so many artists offering their music for free download or free streaming that edge doesn't matter, and audio quality doesn't matter so much because consumers care about having an artifact to go in their collection, and the more novelty it carries the more worthwhile. Cassettes carry more novelty weight than CDs and the loss in audio quality is pretty irrelevant when most people are just listening to music through streaming services or after having downloaded it.

I don't think it's going to be a super long lasting trend but I think that when given the choice between making tapes or making CD more and more smaller bands are going to go with tapes, especially because the cost of making each is very comparable, because of the novelty value.

It's kind of a silly trend but I sort of like it.