Cassettes are a thing, I remember a few years back there were guys on bandcamp selling "limited release cassettes" to the hipsters buying vinyls, but I guess it didnt catch on that big. I kinda thought it would because walking around with a Walkman and over the head headphones seems like a very hipster thing to do.
Maybe its an aspect of vinyls being saved by certain boomers and there have always been hipsters into repairing and collecting stereos and record players, while cassettes and the like were the peak of 'it doesnt matter if you break it, buy another', but CDs are still relatively recent enough that people could come back to them.
I don't think cassettes will really make much of a comeback beyond limited promo releases, and it's mainly due to quality. Not of the format as a whole, because you
can get cassettes to sound as good as any other physical media. Instead, it's due to the quality of the equipment being produced nowadays.
I watch Techmoan a lot, and I appreciate all the deep dives he does into old physical media standards, especially bizarre obsolete ones that you've probably never heard of. When it comes to cassettes, this video really opened my eyes to the issues with modern cassette players:
The short version is that there's really only one cassette mechanism still being produced these days, the Tanashin TN-21, and unfortunately it's a budget design from the mid-80s. Everything about it, from build quality to sound to wow and flutter, is just not that good. And since it's the only design being manufactured anymore since the market isn't big enough to justify spending more, the result is that any cassette player you buy that's been manufactured in the last decade or two is going to make your cassettes sound awful. It doesn't help that most of these "boomboxes" have cheapo components in them, but even ones that don't skimp so hard on the speakers still don't sound great. You're better off looking for an old player in good working condition, but that can get expensive, especially as the years go by and older components kick the bucket.
So because most people probably only have bad experiences with how cassettes sound compared to CDs or vinyl, I doubt cassettes will really make a comeback unless a manufacturer resurrects a better mechanism or designs a new one. But that's a catch-22 there: the market's too small to justify spending money on producing better hardware, but the market won't grow unless there's better hardware to show how good cassettes can sound.
I'm personally building a physical media collection to avoid the issues with streaming services pulling titles without warning, supplemented with trips on the Seven Seas. Thrift stores are a great way to score a bunch of stuff for cheap, and sometimes people will literally be giving away their own collections. I'm sure the population at large is still fine with being beholden to the whims of megacorps because they're slow to wake up to this sort of thing, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a steadily increasing number of people realizing the value of physical media.
