Cassette tapes, like vinyl albums, are making a comeback. While CDs and digital media still reign supreme, according to a 2015 mid-year Nielsen report, the largest operational cassette factory in the US reports an impressive increase in demand.

National Audio Company (NAC) President Steve Stepp told Ars that his Springfield, Missouri, company had been seeing a (very) healthy 20 percent year-over-year growth in demand for audiocassette tapes for several years. But 2015 was even better. As of the beginning of October, NAC reported a 31 percent increase in order volume over the previous year.

NAC is in a curious position, because in addition to being the largest audiocassette factory in the US, it's also one of the last remaining.

“We never believed that the audiocassette was finished,” Stepp told Ars.

He said that as his competitors began bailing out of the cassette business once CDs came to prominence, NAC started buying up their machinery. “It would have been incredibly expensive 30 to 35 years ago when [cassette manufacturing machines] were new on the market, but when our competitors bailed out of the business and started making CDs, we went round the country and bought [them] out," he said.

That proved a profitable investment, because as audiocassettes started losing their appeal in the '90s, manufacturers of the machinery to make them also left the industry. “The situation is this: there's no more new equipment to be had,” Stepp told Ars.

The steady stream of smaller cassette factories going out of business has helped keep NAC's factory floor humming. Just recently, Stepp said, a friend of his who ran an audiocassette factory in Kansas City decided to retire and put his business up for auction. Stepp won the auction on Monday and plans to send four 53-foot trailers to the factory to pick up an assortment of cassette loaders and test equipment.

NAC's factory has eight production lines and more than 40 employees (including four graphic artists and nine audio engineers). To keep those production lines running, the company has 50 to 60 different pieces of heavy machinery in reserve that it has purchased through the years. “Thirty or 40 of that we've cannibalized for parts,” Stepp told Ars. NAC even has its own machine shop to make parts that simply cannot be found anymore.

Stepp says he expects business to increase in 2016. “This year we picked up accounts in Finland, Estonia, and Russia... it's a worldwide phenomenon, [and] basically all of our competition has thrown the towel in years ago.”

Rock out with your walkman out

In a September article, Bloomberg reported that NAC “has deals with major record labels like Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group as well as a number of small contracts with indie bands. About 70 percent of the company's sales are from music cassettes while the rest are blank cassettes.”

Even more mainstream artists are getting in on the cassette hype—Metallica, The Flaming Lips, and Nelly Furtado have all had limited-release cassette editions in recent years. But independent artists have remained loyal to the audiocassette for years, thanks in part to its noise. In 2005, Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore even put together an elegiac book about the mixtape.

Derek Rogers, a Texas-based experimental artist, told Ars that he’s released his music on cassettes as well as CDs and vinyl since 2007. Rogers' music has appeared on more than 50 cassette releases. (His music was also featured last week on NPR's "Songs We Love".)

"There's a thickness and a warmth that inherently comes when utilizing actual tape as a physical preservation of sound, and tape hiss tends to lend itself nicely when writing and recording some forms of experimental drone music,” Rogers wrote to Ars in an e-mail. “Vinyl can be just as warm, really just depends on the mastering process. Digital can be fine too, really all depends on the A to B process of the creation of sounds and the workflow process to the end.”

Rogers said he generally works with labels that release cassette tapes in editions of 50 to 100.

So, at least for some artists, the return to cassettes is about creating a specific sound along with a tangible experience that gets lost with digital music. Not everyone agrees this is worth doing; a recent New York Times op-ed dismisses cassettes as impractical nostalgia.

“The cassette is the embodiment of planned obsolescence,” writes Rosecrans Baldwin. “Each time you play one it degrades. Bad sound gets worse. Casings crack in winter, melt in summer. Inescapably, a cassette tape unspools: it’s only destiny. Fine, death comes to us all.”

Whether the audiocassette’s current (and relatively small) resurgence is due to the fact that aging '80s kids now have (a little) more disposable income to entertain their nostalgic whims or whether its rise is a repudiation of the colder experience that digital music offers, it seems that 2016 is already on track to be good to what remains of the cassette tape business.