Despite the long strips of tape that got tangled everywhere, there was something to be said for creating your own mixtapes and handing them out to your friends.
But before you write off the medium ““ with its cassette-inserts-turned-track-lists and handfuls of songs carefully recorded off the radio ““ as a nostalgic thing of the past, today’s generation has brought the art of musical collage to the digital age.
“Growing up, everyone created their mixtape for their boyfriend or girlfriend or when they went away to college,” said Gina Wilkinson, manager of marketing and communications for the social media Web site imeem. “Now we evolved to the online social mixtape.”
To coincide with the growing popularity of publishing podcasts and personal music blogs, the mixtape has moved from car tape players to a new medium ““ online streams.
“Napster destroyed the mixtape culture,” said Stephen Corwin, a first-year electrical engineering student. “You used to not be able to send one song over AIM, so you would create a mixtape with all the songs you like. With Napster you could get whatever individual song you wanted. However, with podcasts, you can take individual songs and create playlists that you want to share.”
Companies like imeem have taken advantage of this new popularity and created social networks so that users can easily share their taste on music, videos and photography. It’s so easy that Wilkinson herself used imeem playlists to find music for her wedding last year.
“Imeem wasn’t about connecting with people from college,” Wilkinson said. “It was all about hearing your mixtape.”
In 2007, imeem made news as the first social network to partner with the four major record labels, allowing its users to stream almost all of those labels’ videos and music online, free of charge. The site lets users upload and create playlists of music, videos and photos that they embed on their personal imeem pages. Then they have the option to imbed their playlists in their other personal sites, such as their MySpace and Facebook profiles.
“The amount of people on social networks today and people online is growing,” Wilkinson said. “It’s staggering, and we are adding this layer of rich media.”
However, others with more experience in music have opted to create their own sites to share their personal music tastes with others. Corwin created his own Web site, uhohdisco.com, to get his mixes and other songs he likes out to his listeners.
“I DJ with a friend of mine, and we produce tracks too,” Corwin said. “A lot of it has to do with our need to share music with other people. We love to make mixtapes of stuff we mix.”
Although a longtime user of muxtape.com, another Web site that allows individual users to upload playlists online, third-year computer science student Cameron Ketcham is opting to create his own Web site, music.jump.ath.cx, as well.
“It will be different from Muxtape because (it will allow you to) upload any songs, or sounds, or anything,” Ketcham said. “Then it will not only let you choose songs to listen to and download but also you can just go through random songs.”
Ketcham agrees that this need to share one’s music with friends is what inspires people to create playlists online.
“I also want to upload songs I made to this site so people will listen to my songs without me having to find the people or (having them) find me,” he said.
But for musicians not technologically savvy enough to create their own Web sites, social networks and mixtape sites are the place to go to get their music heard. Because of rapid growth from musicians and casual listeners alike, imeem recently surpassed Yahoo Music as the most popular place to find music online.
“It’s not about music consumption at all,” Wilkinson said. “It’s really about this interactive experience with music.”