For small indie artists, cassette tapes make perfect sense. Releasing digitally is of course the easiest way these days but artists usually want a physical artifact as well. It's easier to sell a tape than a download and it's nice to be able to touch your achievement. Vinyl pressing is insanely expensive in comparison and usually requires much larger batches to be produced

Isn't burning CDs just as easy as making tapes, if not easier? It's also better sound quality and you'd have a larger audience of people who have a CD player lying around than people who have cassette players.

At least, I imagine anyone who has a cassette player also has a CD player while many people who have CD players don't have a cassette player.

But.. why not CDs?

Because everyone sells CDs. On tape you have a distinct feeling.

The weirdest album I've seen for sale at a show was a Sega Saturn (or maybe it was a Megadrive) cartridge.

It would have been a Megadrive cart then, because the Saturn used... you guessed it, CD's ;)

Because CDs are boring?

Well, no, CDs are definitively digital, hence the format being called CDDA (Compact Disc Digital Audio). Everything is encoded as binary, not variable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc#Physical_details

But still, that hardly makes cassettes better sounding.

Of course, you are completely wrong as other posters have pointed out -- CD is indeed a fully digital format (but it does not have a filesystem, just a continous stream of binary data with a TOC section near the beginning of the disc to tell the CD player about the timecode location of the tracks)

I thought it would be worth mentioning that you may be confusing CD with Laserdisc, the video format. Those look a lot like huge CD's but are in fact analog and work more like what you describe.

That's not true. CDs store discrete data and vinyls continous data. However, it is true that CDs can store formats of higher quality than mp3s that cause no sound degradation.

I think the point I was trying to make was that tape is something different than digital. You can download high fidelity files as well and if you buy a CD you'll probably end up importing the files anyway.

With that said, cassettes are definitely not a hifi option and I'm quite sure it's genre dependent as well.

There was this thing called Digital Audio Tapes, for what it’s worth. Never got much consumer traction though, eventually repurposed for digital data storage, DDS.

And there was also DCC, the Digital Compact Cassette.

DAT, of course, saw reasonable success in the recording industry for transferring 2-track digital lossless audio to and fro studios and such before CD burners were commonly available. DCC saw very little, if any, success anywhere :)

They're like the dwarves of Erebor. I would be very worried if I were them, considering the fact that they're the home of the Norwegian Ridheback.