Posted on Monday, July 30th, 2012 by Uri Halevi
The mixtape is a lost art. With the rise of easy playlist making online, there’s no longer any effort being put into building a story through a mixtape… Or so we thought until we found Everyone’s Mixtape!
Everyone’s Mixtape is not for people who wants instant music. The whole concept of it is that you really put effort into creating each mixtape; build a theme, connect songs so that they would seem to belong one after the other, create an ongoing story using the songs that you chose, one that has a beginning, a climax and a catharsis… a true art. Richard Mai, the romantic behind Everyone’s Mixtape, really relayed his passion for this to us:
“When you made a mixtape, it was something different. You’d listen to every track forwards and backwards to make sure tracks flowed together. There was no shuffle mode on cassette tapes. It was a process; a labor of love.”
After registering to Everyone’s Mixtape you can listen to one of other people’s mixtapes but I think its about making your own mixtape. You click ‘create new mix’ title your mixtape and after you decide if its going to be a 60, 90 120, or unlimited minutes audio cassette, you start building it.
There is a short video that explains how to find and add music to your mixtape, you can try to take music from YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud or one of the other mixtapes that inspired you. I said try because you will find that a lot of the songs you want to add, are not embeddable.
Creating a good mixtape is no walk in the park. It involves work and thought, but your efforts do pay off when the mixtape is all done. And although creator Richard Mai wanted to rediscover his “nostalgic love for making, giving and receiving mixtapes”, he’s really succeeded in his aim to mesh that with the new digital and social landscape, reproducing the cassette tape experience as much as possible over the internet.
But although nostalgia rules the day, as Mai argues, “it’s a great way to find new artists, and hear new songs. And that’s a huge benefit for me. I’m always on the lookout for new music, so the site really serves as a way to open people up to more music.”
So try Everyone’s Mixtape and see if you’ll get a similar blast from the past! Nostalgia and discovery all in one? Works every time 😉
