There's at least one music genre (vaporwave) that has a lot of new releases on tape, and often tapes are the only physical format released. Actually come of think of it, there's some releases on floppy disk as well!
The obsolete format I’ve most recently gotten into is VHS tape. Used decks go for $10 or $20 at our reuse center, you can buy prerecorded tapes for 50 cents. If a deck fails or a tape gets pulled you won’t feel so bad. Decks from 2000 or so are solidly better than they were in the 1980s, particularly they all support HiFi sound which is excellent. The quality is not so good as a DVD or Blu-Ray but a good movie on VHS is still a good movie.
Getting the best quality out of VHS is a rabbit hole I went down last year. There are a couple movies that I have that weren't released in any format besides VHS and I spent quite a lot of time trying to get the best quality digital copy I could. There are a dozen or so (mostly s-vhs jvc) models that have circuitry to stabilize the images and they start at $300 on ebay.
One was Norman's Awesome Experience (three people get sent back to Ancient Rome) and the other was a documentary Desmond Morris's The Human Animal which I eventually found a rip that claimed to be from DVD that was better than any that I managed (even though I haven't found the actual dvds for sale which makes me wonder if it was sourced from dvd)
Ah good point. Hadn't considered mods as a distro mechanism. I still have all the mods I made in the late 80s/90s - rendered them and uploaded to Soundcloud for the world to enjoy / laugh at ... a very resilient format!
