Really thinking about it, maybe they're not more fraglie. CDs scratch easily but tapes are still exposed on the bottom, so you really want to keep both in their cases.

I still think it's wild that portable (as in the Walkman sense) CD players were a thing - a spinning disc with a precision optical pickup with very little separating it from the outside world that b1umps around on your hip as you walk. I guess it's equally crazy to have a tape motor on your hip, but it just seemed less fragile to me.

My musical habits for the past few years have been long mixes of songs on YouTube, that I don't really skip around in. I think YouTube's ads that annoyingly hit between every video nudged me in that direction; but that's why I made mixtapes back in the day when you bought an album but there was only 1 or 2 good songs on it.