The Sad Death of the Mixed Tape
Here’s a sad truth: the mixed tape is dead.
For many people, this is a trivial event. After all, the act of making a mixed tape required time and effort. There was no simple dragging and dropping after you ripped some tracks off a CD or downloaded them from the Web.
Instead, the creation of a mixed tape was a labour of love. If you want to create a cool mixed tape, you had to raid your LP or cassette collection. Then, you had to think about how you want to build the play list. Then, you had to manually put everything together, which usually means spending a lot of time queuing everything up so the complete song is recorded with no gaps between each track you were recording.
If you did it right, however, the satisfaction is huge.
All the work involved meant the mixed tape has particular value if you wanted to impress people. If, for example, you are really interested in someone, you could score huge points by sending them a mixed tape. Not only did it show them what kind of music you liked and wanted to share with them but it meant you were willing to spend the time to do it.
Today, putting together a “mixed tape” has lost that specialness given it’s so much easier using iPods, MP3s, CDs and the Web. A little drag, a little drop, and your done. No muss, no fuss but it’s just not the same.
(Note: This is the second installment of my summer vacation blogging series. Yesterday’s post focused how our lives are on the record now).
July 10th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
Seems to me this is part & parcel of the death of the album itself…the notion that a group of songs arranged in a certain way creates a more complete & fulfilling experience than those songs would individually. It’s a pretty major shift in the way this generation experiences music. How many 20 year olds today sit in a room for 48 minutes (or 96 or 144) listening to an entire album over and over again with the liner notes on their lap?
But for those of us over 30, there’s still value in a good mix tape done right…the reduction of technical friction just leaves more time for craft & inspiration.