Most of the artists I'm familiar with that release on cassette tapes are vaporwave or adjacent and sell their work as DRM-free lossless FLAC files on Bandcamp as well, so there's really no downside for the artist or the audience.
Niche physical releases are cool because they're intentionally obscure and for fans, by fans, and explicitly for certain subcultures or even collectors within those subcultures. I've seen floppy disk and Nintendo DS cartridge releases.
There are even more formats out there you can (re)release on:
Um, CDs are also "niche physical releases" these days. They're not quite as old-fashioned as cassettes or vinyl, but they're still generally considered "obsolete" now with streaming music services.
Not nearly niche enough for some hypebeasts, but nothing wrong with CDs in and of themselves. I think finding ways to recontextualize the experience of owning and listening are worthwhile.
I am a musician myself and I have frienda who live from touring — they told me there have been tours where they haven't sold a single CD while they sell 15 to 20 LPs on a small concert.
Killing the most ubiquitous format for free lossless digital audio and replacing it with analogue sources that degrade with each play or DRM and subscriptions purely because it’s not cool enough seems like a terrible idea. Apparently that’s where we are.
Cassettes are more expensive and worse quality, but significantly more robust in typical use until you put it in a bad device (or hands) that gets the tape out.
I've given cassettes to a 3 year old, and they all still play fine except for that one where the tape got out (cheap player). I don't think CDRs (or commercial CDs for that matter) would sound as nice after the rough treatment they got.
The cassettes sounded awful on day one, and rest assured they didn't get better with age. (Neither did the capstan in your cassette deck, which I'd suggest checking to make sure it isn't turning into goop that will literally ruin your tapes for good.)
Meanwhile, my CD-Rs are still fine, but then I didn't buy the cheapest ones I could find.
Out of all the 80s artifacts that hipsters could resurrect... wow, just wow. Cassettes. They could have brought back designer jeans, off-the-shoulder blouses, normally-aspirated V12 Ferraris, and cheap cocaine... but no, they decided to rehabilitate cassette tapes. This truly is the worst timeline.
You are aware that there are people who like the sound of tape noise and the saturation comes with it?
As a medium it also one of the few that gives listeners a high incentive to not skip songs.
These are valid artistic choices, just like you know guitarist who run their guitar through amplifiers that distort. On persons "mistake" can be another persons goal.
Also: if the thing includes a download code to a lossless flac, why would someone even consider to buy a CD? So they can listen to the exactly same thing, but with worse ergonomics? With the casette you get at least a different variant of the thing.
I wouldn't use it myself if I made classical or choir music, but that is not what I do.
> These are valid artistic choices, just like you know guitarist who run their guitar through amplifiers that distort. On persons "mistake" can be another persons goal.
Sure, if that’s what you want to do, do it and the record it on a better medium.
