I’m GenX. We didn’t create the compact audio cassette, but we did use it to create the mixtape – the pinnacle usage for a cassette tape. They were passed to crushes in the hallway, decorated with markers and stickers, melted on our dashboards of our cars, slid around in the floorboard, and when their time was up, got chewed up by a tape deck.
I loved making mixes for friends and being an artist (before I knew what a designer really was), I loved designing the covers. I would spend hours blending the right songs, segueing smoothly from Side A to B and then break out the colored pencils for the cover.
It wasn’t until many years later when a CD burner showed up in the office that I decided to rekindle that passion.
Music files were huge. CD burners were incredibly slow. Color printers weren’t any better. It really was a labor of love to compile those first few mix CDs, but man it felt cool to be able to pass your friend an audio CD when cassette tapes were still the norm in cars. Then there was the printing of the covers, cutting them down with an Xacto and folding them into the jewel cases. [wow, the free time I used to have 🙄]
Move on a few years and the MP3 revolution hit. I started saving off ZIP files of songs and creating standalone web pages for friends to download the mixes. It always felt a little shadier as MP3s for some reason, I think there was more of a “stealing” stigma associated with the format. I always justified it as turning my friends on to new artists, I was never copying entire albums for them.
Then came the streaming services. SO much easier to share playlists with friends at just the touch of a button. But time for making mixes became a lot more scarce. I got married, bought a house, had a child, became an adult. Then came the pandemic and video calls. So many video calls. Who had time to listen to a full album uninterrupted and see which tracks – if any – you wanted to add to a playlist? I also lost the time to design covers for each, which I do truly miss (some examples to the right).
Fortunately, there’s always time for music somewhere in the day. And while I’ve never really called mixtapes a “hobby”, I have been creating them... well, for decades now and hope to keep doing it for as long as I have hearing.
“TELL GRANDPA TO SHUT THAT GARBAGE OFF!”
“No way! This is Version 2.0, their best album!”
So if you want to check out some new tunes, feel free to follow me on Apple Music or Spotify. I can’t promise how frequently mixes come out, but there is a pretty deep backlog of playlists to peruse. There’s usually a fairly wide variety of genres: indie, pop, electronica, Americana, R&B, rock. Maybe you’ll find your new favorite artist, who knows.
Cheers
