Mix tape

Sometimes I go to yard sales to buy cassettes compiled by people who are complete strangers to me. You see something that has 'Marty's Mix' scrawled on it in ballpoint pen. You take it home and you don't know if it's going to be US post-punk hardcore or Kenny Rogers. Whatever it is, though, I know I'm getting a slice of someone's life. Cassettes are the only format that can give you that.

- Thurston Moore of band Sonic Youth (Quoted by Pete Paphides)

A Mix Tape is an amateur-created audio cassette music compilation, compiled of different songs from different albums (usually taken from other tapes, from LPs or the radio). While sometimes mix tapes contained songs from various albums by the same artist, most mix tapes were also collections of songs by different artists. Most mix tapes were inherently personal, either kept for oneself, or given to a friend or lover. However, as we shall discuss, mix tapes had special meaning in hip hop culture, in which they were inherently public media forms.

Beginning in the late 1960s, with the emergence of the Philips compact in 1963 and the emergence of Japanese-made cassette players and recorders in the mid to late 1960s, mix tapers began to challenge the notion of the single-artist album by taking on the role of the creator (Millard 315-6). As scholar Rob Drew notes, “Rather than conforming to artistic intention and industry practice, mixers treated the album as an open work and took the selection and ordering of songs into their own hands” (535). The mix tape thereby enabled people “to make their own personal soundtracks and compilation. “ (535)

As we shall see, the mix tape as it is defined here would disappear in the 1990s with the emergence of the compact disk, and later the digital playlist. While these musical forms have inherited tropes of the original mix tape form, there are fundamental differences between the experience of creating, listening to, and receiving an original cassette mix tape versus these new "versions".

Technological History

The Compact Cassette

The compact cassette which became the form of choice for a mix tape is the compact cassette, was introduced by American company Philips in 1963. However, during their first year on the market, Philips only managed to sell 9,000 units of cassette. (Millard 316) As a result, Philips did not declare the cassette as proprietary technology, and instead, encouraged other companies to license it. All that Philips required was that all other manufacturers adhere to the Philips standard, so that all manufactured cassettes were equally compatible (317).

In the mid 1960s, the tape was accessible for widespread home use. Simultaneously, Philips had aligned themselves with various Japanese manufacturers, notably Panasonic and Norelco, who were now producing various cassette players. By, 1968, Millard notes, by 1968 approximately eighty five different manufacturers had sold over 2.4 million cassette players across the globe (317).

IMPROVEMENTS- Dolby etc... MUSIC AVAILABLE ON CASSETTES..

Home Recording Technology

Following the emergence of the cassette tape and early cassette recorders and layers was the introduction of more sophisticated home cassette recording technologies by Japanese manufacturers in the 1970s, specifically those that allowed cross media recording.

By the 1970s, the affordable combination record player/radio systems soon came with a built in cassette player, which could record any output out of the unit, either off the radio, or off an LP (319).

Simultaneously, the cassette was becoming a more and more popular way to purchase commercial music and music listeners wanted a way to record music not just from vinyl to cassette, but from audio cassette to audio cassette. This was altered with the emergence of the double or dual cassette deck (see Patent) allowing the user to record from one pre-recorded tape to a blank one in the same unit. This technology would later be developed into the popular, portable "boom box" form, which allowed your tape-to-tape reproduction studio to be taken with you at all times (Millard 322).

By 1982, more than twenty million audio recording devices were believed to be imported into the United States, and it was estimated that approximately sixty percent of American households had at least one tape recorder (Jeffords PAGE).

References

Paphides, Pete. "Thinking inside the (plastic) box: Still cherished by mix-tape romantics, the cassette isn't ready to die, says Pete Paphides". The Times. London (UK): Dec 18, 2009. p. 8

Millard, Andrew. America On Record: A history of recorded sound. Second Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press,2005.

Drew, Rob. "Mixed Blessings: The Commercial Mix and the Future of Music Aggregation". Popular Music and Society; Oct 2005; 28, 4; Research Library pg. 533