Viva La Mixtape
Allow me to rewind a couple of years or 15 (great to get a pun in on the first sentence!). There was a black art being mastered by many a teenager, an art that required both patience and the reflexes of a panther. Nowadays, it’s fair to say that in its analogue form the mixtape is pretty much filed next to floppy disks, the Dodo and paying for pornography.
With the advent of Mp3 players, iPods and more recently online streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora, the mixtape has been overtaken by the playlist. Bleaugh.
Why bleaugh? Well it’s just not as nice a word for a start. It has a certain clinical undertone to it that just doesn’t give you the same kind of pride when you say it. Try it.
“I’ve made you a playlist” Vs “I’ve made you a mixtape” – Mixtape wins with a knockout in the first round.
So what is it that sets these two things apart? The playlist is, after all, still a collection of songs in an order of your liking, called whatever you want it to be. A mixtape is nothing more is it? Well yes and no. Returning back to the good old days again – you would be recording from one tape tape to another (or from a CD if you were posh), recording in real time. This would mean you needed to really plan the songs out, in some cases ensuring that you didn’t run out of tape halfway through a song. Once you have your completed mix and you were happy with it, the satisfaction you got was something that you very rarely get these days with your new fangled playlists (bleaugh). Some would even go to the extent of designing a nice cover for your tape, good for indexing but great for showing off when you lend said tape to your friends. After all, that was the whole point for most people. These mixtapes weren’t just something that you would make and then store away for posterity, they were for sharing.
If you like music, you should like sharing and discovering music. Mixtapes/playlists are by far one of the best ways to find out about artists and tracks that may have slipped your attention. Last.fm does this in a totally different way, matching you with like-minded users of the community and exposing the rest of their listening habits to you. It works, I’ve found umpteen new artists and bands this way. But it lacks that personal touch.
8tracks on the other hand really encapsulates the mixtape spirit. It’s a site I only came across recently after picking up the iPhone app on a whim, but it’s one I’m really going to stick with for a long time I feel.
Each mix consists of at least 8 tracks, carefully picked by the user and uploaded to the site. You can tag mixes with whatever genre that is most fitting and even select artwork and give a description if you so wish. Nice.
The thought that goes into the mixes by its members really shows, it’s what sets it apart from the competition.
Browsing around the 240,000 or so mixes, I’ve discovered some absolutely brilliant music. It’s really refreshing to know that there are people out there who, like me, still hold on to the days of the mixtape.
