I just produced 150 cassettes of my new album and people like it to have it on cassette, even if they do not have a player. But they can hold something physical in there hands while listening on-line.

And yeah, I've produced, mixed and mastered the whole album, so I can say for sure, the cassettes sounds much much better and organic then the _same_ master on Spotify. It's a subtle mixture of tape compression, saturation, hiss, eqing, jitter that makes it somehow lively. And it will sound slightly different on every owns tape player.

We are on our third run of tapes now (50 each). Chrome-Oxide tapes can sound surprisingly good.

Our main reason is that people want to buy music at gigs and just offering solitary paper sheets with download codes doesn't really work. A tape is tangible and (for our audience) sexier than CDs and with the download code included many buy the tape even without having a suitable playback device as you observed as well.

For musicians tapes have the advantage that you can totally DIY them much easier and with less up-front cost than vinyl. And they rake less space and weigh less.

Vinyl starts to get economic after after 150 or 200 pieces depending on the pressing plant.

The thing I like about recorded music is that the listener’s equipment is part of the performance; in a sense, it’s the actual instrument, being played remotely over time and space by an engineer who’s never seen it and musicians who made a different performance in a different room on different instruments, as well as here and now by the listener herself. Every person and piece of technology in the chain shapes the experience, and every performance is unique, even if it’s you listening to Gimme Shelter on repeat on a crappy mp3 player and cheap earbuds.

There's something about analog I can't quite put my finger on it. Take digital photography for example. No matter how sharp, how "vibrant" the photos from a really good digital camera of today, it doesn't feel the same as photos from some 50 year old Nikon or Canon. Call it nostalgia if you will, but digital for all its strenghts seems to miss something

If the track played though a cassette is that much of an improvement, couldn't you have a mastering step that runs the track through a cassette player? Or is there a je ne sais quoi that even that would fail to capture?

You’re right, being able to hold the music is nice. PDF liner notes aren’t the same. For your next release you might be interested in the cassette label run by a friend of mine: helloamericalit.com