The Lost Art of the Mix Tape

Obviously not many people use cassette tapes anymore. Even though you can still find a cassette player in some cars, most people don’t have them at home. I remember the transition from cassette tape to CD and trying to adapt the art of the mix tape to a new media. It was easier to make a mix CD for a friend but it often lacked that handmade song list and artwork that made mix tapes so much fun. I missed trying to figure out just what order I wanted the songs to be in and how to minimize the amount of silence at the end of each side. It was so easy with a CD to re-order songs on the computer before burning the final product. Mix tapes took significantly more planning. There was more room for your personalized art work on a mix CD but it still wasn’t the same.

The transition from CD to digital music player was even stranger. Suddenly I had my entire music library on me at all times. I stopped using CD players almost entirely, with the exception of ripping them into my iTunes so that I could transfer them to my iPod. The mix CD turned into the play list and was much harder to share with friends. It’s pretty easy to send a friend a link to a song you like or an artists Myspace or Facebook page, but it lacks that personal touch of a customized physical media. It’s easier to lend someone a Flash drive than burn a bunch of CD’s and that doesn’t really allow for the artwork that was so fun with mix tapes and mix CD’s. Sure you could design a album cover thumbnail so it would show up in their play list, but I find that kind of boring.

The mix tape is definitely a lost art that will be missed, but we do have the capability of having and listening to so much more music than we did even ten years ago. It’s amazing how much music of varying genres we can expose ourselves to now. With websites like Pandora and last.fm we can expand that selection even farther by finding other artists that are similar to the artists that we like. With social media websites we can find new and upcoming bands and don’t have to rely only on the radio and word of mouth. It seems like more people than ever before are creating music and that music is becoming more varied and interested. I think that’s a good thing even though sometimes I wish I still had some mix tapes in my glove box.