If anyone wants a natural example of what tape can sound like, here's an interesting album on Spotify: Alice Atieno by Collela Mazee – https://open.spotify.com/album/6j72tDGcz97abyKDOP3aWp

Kenyan benga music from the early '80s or so. It's got every type of tape artifact. It's horrible, haha. There are even tracks where the tape head seems to be picking up the other side of the cassette in reverse.

It's not supposed to sound like that. Just a result of stewardship and rightsholders and incentives. Someone somewhere has a cassette tape and digitizes it. And uploads it to Spotify. Then it's forever.

(Frankly, I think it's gorgeous. The combination of the music and the recording is accidentally something really special. Laid-back but gently enthusiastic and warm 4/4 music, bright bur melancholy. Sounds like the Mega-Man 1 soundtrack played by a live band? And a really, really good band. And then it's all tragically messed up by the gears of history. Fluttering, swaying underwater. And… it's all so pretentious when I type it out… but it just… there's something about it. It's pretty great music for programming, haha.)