The humble cassette tape has long seemed destined for a dignified death, taking its place beside the rotary dial telephone, the floppy disk, and cathode-ray tube televisions in the cobwebbed corners of museums or junk shops.

Yet, almost 60 years after it was first launched by Philips, the Dutch electronics company, the tape today doggedly endures, finding new fans in an era of digital overload and riding in the slipstream of the so-called vinyl revival.

For many growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, this pocket-size piece of plastic was a prime enabler of musical discovery. The ability to record songs off the radio or other mediums with a blank cassette opened up new possibilities for finding and sharing music, and gave rise to the concept of the mixtape.

Cassettes were cheap and fairly durable – at least until the magnetic tape spilled loose and would need to be wound back in with a pencil stuck through the spool.

On this writer’s daily bus rides to high school, tapes were in constant circulation. Mostly filled with rapidfire punk, they were swapped, discussed and listened to on portable players like the Sony Walkman – a prized possession. Anyone known to have an older sibling with a decent record collection was inundated with blank tapes and requests for recordings.

It’s hard not to lapse into a fog of nostalgia when recalling the cassette tape’s charms. And that nostalgia is at least part of the puzzle when considering the comeback of cassettes in the contemporary listening landscape.

Despite the ongoing dominance of digital music, backed by the ease and immediacy of streaming services, physical formats have proved stubbornly resilient. The resurgence of vinyl records over the past decade has been well-documented. The less-celebrated CD also retains its loyal enthusiasts, most notably in Japan.

Now the compact cassette, for all its imperfections, has been placed in the revivalist ranks. While still modest, cassette tape sales are on the rise in countries including Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, likely boosted by big-name artistes such as Lady Gaga, who recently released an album on the format.

But headline sales offer only a partial picture. A diverse range of independent, sometimes hyperlocal, music labels have increasingly embraced cassettes in recent years. This is evident on the music website Bandcamp, which many use to disseminate releases.

Emerging labels such as Chinabot, launched in 2017 with a roster of experimental artistes from across Asia, have chosen the cassette as a key medium. Each tape is issued in eye-catching colours and with unique inner sleeve designs, and accompanied by a digital download option.

Whether cassettes are on the comeback or never really went away is a point of debate. Griffith University researcher Benjamin Duster wrote his PhD thesis on cassette tape culture, drawing on fieldwork in underground music scenes in Australia, Japan and the US.

He argues that the cassette was “constantly used on a small scale by niche music scenes such as hip-hop, noise and punk throughout the 2000s when it was generally considered to be an ‘obsolete format’ in Japan and most Western societies”.

Utarid Tapes, an independent label based in Kuala Lumpur, is an example of longevity in the cassette tape field. The label began in 2005, putting out cassettes of local Malaysian hardcore bands, and has notched up 92 releases to date.

“I grew up listening to cassette tapes back in the early ’90s. My dad was a fan of local pop music, and I always listened to his favourite songs,” says the label’s founder, Azwari Zainal.

He recalls dubbing and sharing tapes among friends growing up in the city, and ordering physical copies by placing well-hidden money in envelopes that he’d post to music labels. “Cassettes have always been strong in Malaysia, at least in DIY hardcore punk circles. Tapes are still here and always important,” he notes.

Among the tape’s advantages for a small music label, Azwari cites the lower production costs compared with CDs or vinyl, and the fact he can order smaller batches of 50 or 100 copies. By contrast, the minimum order locally for a CD pressing is 1,000.

A few persistent producers of the format are now adjusting to rising demand. US-based National Audio is reportedly the largest manufacturer of cassette tapes in the world, producing up to 30 million cassettes annually. Melbourne-based Dex Audio is the leading producer of cassettes in Australia, and remained active through the lean years by making specialised tapes for police to use for recording interviews.

What is it about the cassette today that appeals to new as well as some old fans?

It’s likely not the audio quality, which even the late Dutch inventor of the cassette, Lou Ottens, acknowledged was inferior to other formats. But there are myriad other factors.

As UK-based academic Iain Taylor notes, writing in “The Conversation”, one’s “enjoyment of music, and the cultural rituals surrounding that enjoyment, is a complex and deeply social thing that engages more than just our ears”.

Like their vinyl counterparts, cassettes challenge the digital trend as a physical item to collect, hold, and interact with. They offer a more personalised connection with artistes, and a tangible way of expressing support.

The tape’s simplicity and affordability, as well as its flaws, are all part of the package. In popular culture, the tape also retains a romantic status, as symbolic of the joy of sharing and connecting through music.

While resistant to the nostalgia surrounding it, one can still be drawn to old-fashioned tapes. Pressing “play”, you may marvel as the two spools languidly turn to produce sound through the tinny speakers of a decades-old tape deck.

Against the odds, the cassette tape has survived – a curious artefact floating on the digital tide.

This article was written by David Hopkins for Nikkei Asia.