I have this vivid memory from my childhood. It’s my brother and I in the backseat of our early 90’s family car, complete with a flashy burgundy interior and a futuristic voice command that would remind you to “please buckle up” when you closed the car doors. Puff, the Magic Dragon is playing on the tape deck and it’s coming to an end. Just about where we’d find out that the dragon frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee, it cuts off and starts to blare some inaudible jargon. “Where’s my music Mom?” I asked. “Dad made a mixtape for all of us so we don’t get sick of each other’s music Vanessa, so you get a song and then we get a song.”

My parents had inadvertently made me my first mixtape at the age of four.

Not long after, cassettes came in and out of my life like a distant friend. I’d make mixtapes for friend’s parties that we’d listen to while we ate Doritos, talked about boys and stuck marshmallows on the faces of those who were asleep. Everyone’s first car in high school had a dire need for mixes and bargain bin tapes save for those boys who invested in CD players they’d install in their beat up jalopy’s during shop class. Then, like a bat out of hell, tapes came back into my life in the most peculiar way. “There are two guys in my kitchen that bring tape boxes with them to work,” my boyfriend said to me during dinner. “Oh god,” I thought, “I hope my dad hasn’t given away his cassette collection.”

If you’re an early adopter of the newest fad of procuring cassettes instead of vinyl, mp3’s or those other circular music things they call CD’s, you already know that the first ever Cassette Store Day was held this year all around the world to some pretty good success. Major bands such as The Flaming Lips, At the Drive-In, Deer Hunter, Fucked Up, Haim and Los Capesino’s all participated in the inaugural event, as well as a slew of major independently owned record shops around the world.

“Cassette Store Day started out as a small venture. We first reached out to friends who are considered champions of the format from LA, NYC and Tokyo. Ultimately, it ended up taking place in countries all over the world including Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Australia, USA, UK, France, Spain, Germany and Italy. With hundreds of events, and nearly one hundred releases,” explained Steve Rose, one of the founders of Cassette Store Day who runs a cassette and vinyl label Sexbeat while he’s not at his day job at Transgressive Records. “There are three of us who organized the first ever Cassette Store Day, Matt Flag, who plays in a band called Fair Ohs and runs a cassette label called Suplex Cassettes, Jen Long, a BBC Radio presenter who also runs a cassette label called Kissability and I. All of us have been running cassette based labels for the last 5 or so years, but over the last year or two we’ve really noticed that a lot more people are involved with cassettes than ever before. This is partly why we decided to organize CSD this year – it seemed like a good time to bring the resurgence to people’s attention.”

And who’s to blame them? The idea of bringing back cassettes was only inevitable, our culture embraces retro with open arms. Besides, they’re cheap to buy, fun to make and while their audio quality isn’t astronomical, they’ve still have a lot going for them. “They allow small labels a lot more freedom to release what they want,” Steve adds, “and not be restrained by having to balance things financially, which is always a concern when doing vinyl releases.”

I wondered if bands, who who independently distributed their albums felt that way. I decided to get in touch with LA’s lo-fi indie band TV Girl who recently released their latest album Lonely Women as a limited edition cassette tape. “Shrink Rap Included!” boasts their BandCamp. So why did they decide to do it? “Because we’re idiots basically,” Brad Petering answered. “Not really. Well, maybe. We wanted to do Vinyl but we didn’t have enough lead time to have them ready for the release date. Tapes have a quicker turnaround time and are much cheaper to boot. It was nice to have something physical to offer people who prefer that.”

Despite the recent resurgence, it wasn’t really lucrative. TV Girl ended up selling about 90 of their cassettes. “So if we had only printed 100 we would be nearly sold out! Unfortunately we made 250 and are now stuck with boxes of unsold tapes until the day we die. That was our bad getting them professionally done. Tapes are meant to be intimate and handmade and in extremely small runs. Learn from our mistake. If you must do tapes, hand dub them in your living room, do the art yourself, and make 50.”

Brad raised a good point, many of my cherished memories were when the tape was personalized in some way. I can remember going to buy my first CD at HMV, but I have no real memories of getting a tape. “They have a certain retro-cache that only comes from obsolete technology.” said Brad. “Also if you’re out on a date with a cute girl that you met at a local DIY punk show, you might be able to get her to come back to your place by inviting her to check out your tape collection.”

What surprised me was the answer I got from Steve when I asked him what his memories were of cassettes. “I don’t particularly view cassettes with such a sense of nostalgia that people assume goes hand in hand with the cassette’s current resurgence,” said Steve. “I was born in the eighties, so I grew up with cassettes, but for me the reason that they are around today is because they are still useful.”

As it stands, Neilsen SoundScan is reporting that cassettes only allot for roughly .02% of the 2013 album sales. That’s not a number that makes me want to jump to the conclusion that cassettes are just as useful in present day. I feel that tapes will never escape the cold hard truth that they’re just another alternative, a droll tactic to give away music in a unique format. Once you take away the ingenuity put into limited runs, that artistic value of putting pen, sharpie or silkscreen to its 4×3 insert, the cassette loses its exclusivity.

Do I think that tapes will ever make as big of a comeback as LP’s have? No, not by a long shot. Do I think that they’re really great for DIY labels that are going to put their creativity and penmanship to good use? Hell yeah, and I’ll probably even pick up a few too. First I’ll have to find someone with a cassette player though.