"Tape," like "film," is an anachronism.

My admiration for the resiliency of the word "tape" knows no measure. Very little audio record-keeping is "taped" these days. It is recorded certainly, it is captured, but not taped.

If you peruse today’s comment boards and even news headlines, you’ll read about the “taped” conversations between Cohen and Trump. Unless it was magnetically captured to a tape medium, which I doubt it was, it wasn’t taped. People familiar with Cohen’s work might not be shocked if it indeed were found on a microcassette, but this article refers to “tape” more generally.

The Watergate tapes were on actual tape. For recording one’s own phone calls in the 21^st century, however, it is almost always done with a tap off the phone into either a recording program or a handheld digital recorder. But nothing else sounds as cool as “tape,” so “tape” it is.

My hat is off to "tape," a word that managed to outlive itself.