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Mixtapes: Back in a big way

Were you the type of person that used to spend hours building the perfect mixtape for friends? Every song was carefully chosen to meet two criteria:

1. Must be awesome and properly reflect back on your awesomeness for knowing about the song
2. Must fit into the 1/2-hour-per-side constraint

As we all know, the iPod has for all intents and purposes extinguished criteria two with approaching-infinite storage space. We can keep every song we’ve ever heard in our entire lifetime in our jeans pocket. The newly-scored B-Side from Steve Malkmus is on equal footing with your embarrassingly large assortment of WHAM! hits.

But now, the internet has brought back the excitement and cool factor. Muxtape.com lets users upload MP3s to build their own online mixtape. Random tapes are displayed in a cassette-like stack so you can search others’ collection. But the real catch is in the constraints: You can only upload twelve songs and they have to be under 10MB each.

While this doesn’t sound so bad, once you start trying to stay under that limit, you realize the magic of the old experience is back. Every song says something about you. There’s no way to put every cool song on your tape, and so you’re forced to figure out if you want the Gorillaz vs Styx mashup after The Sea And Cake or if the flow works better if you drop in that Neutral Milk Hotel jam instead. Will it be too heavily biased toward rock and not properly pimp your hip-hop prowess if you didn’t add that Aesop Rock song after the Adolescents? These are the choices you’re forced to make, and having those constraints is a big part of the fun.

The setup is extremely minimal, as is the Help section. You have to make sure all songs are MP3s, not some Apple DRM hybrid. It may take a couple false starts, as this site is still experiencing growing pains in usability, but the owner was smart in getting his idea out there and letting us all experience those pains along with him. I’ve been listening to other people’s mixes for a couple days now and building my own, too (likely not work-safe, fyi).

Check it out, you’ll probably find something new and maybe get back into the tape business yourself – virtually of course.