How long have mixtapes been around

Users and streamers are tracked, popularity indexes are created, marketed, and corporations not only make but push music to the listeners based on their listening habits. The idea of the mixtape has been completely transformed, but can we truly say it is a mixtape when there is no tape and we are just listeners without participation. Only time will tell the future of the curated music, the compilation, the mixtape or the playlists, for now, its music on demand.

Get top latest music news delivered to your inbox. Newsletters may offer personalised content or advertisements. Share this :. Share on facebook Facebook. Share on twitter Twitter. Share on linkedin LinkedIn. Share on whatsapp WhatsApp. Share on email Email. Share on pinterest Pinterest. Share on tumblr Tumbler. Words: Nakul Vagale December 13, Cassettes, on the other hand, could move great distances and with stealth.

The recordings would deteriorate rapidly as listeners dubbed them for friends and friends dubbed them for acquaintances, each playback burying the sounds further in hiss.

Not just hip hop but metal, hardcore, industrial, New Age and more. Two playback devices that were coming into popularity around the same time as hip hop — the Walkman and the boombox — capitalized on this portability, both seemingly tailor-made for the sort of urban-warrior lifestyle that hip hop glorified. A dub of a tape could travel hundreds of miles and in the process spawn off a dozen more copies.

New Yorkers could slide dubs to out-of-town cousins. Bleary-eyed suburbanites could record late-night radio shows off the airways and spread those static-blanketed secrets outward. The relative ease of re-recordings and low duplication cost opened up new and extensive options for self-documentation to artists and listeners alike. Official Cold Crush Brothers recorder Elvis Moreno, AKA Tape Master, would get access to plug his tape recorder directly into the soundboard, while an unsanctioned partygoer might just place their box somewhere in the crowd and hit the record button.

Dozens of tapes of prominent crews like The Furious Five and The Crash Crew multiplied like rabbits from there on out, sold at shows and swapped through quiet networks of traders and collectors. Most of the New York rap music that was manufactured by larger independent labels was, and still is, difficult to come by on tape. As a major-label hub, New York City experienced a push and pull between its underground and its mainstream music industry — for many years, cassettes played the middleman.

And then DJ Clue, who I feel really revolutionized the mixtape game and took it from being pretty much a DJ's set on a tape to making it about exclusives and new records, and almost being its own project and its own form. Clue birthed a whole era. There's the mixtape game pre- 50 Cent and post Cent. There was the era from Clue and Doo Wop, when so many rappers came and spit 16s on beats that weren't theirs, into 50 turning them into his own records.

Instead of just spitting a 16, he started to re-do people's hooks and make his own songs to the point where as DJs we wanted to play his versions in the club. It was a very exclusive world -- you almost felt like an elite social group, you know what I'm saying? From hearing "Who Shot Ya? From the 50 era, that's pretty much when it became a street album. Mixtapes destroyed the demo tape; nobody cared about your demo tape anymore, it was like, "What are you doing with your mixtape, and how are the streets selling it?

It was that era after 50, from '04 through '06, where I was pretty much a dominant force. The mixtape game has always had its realms across the country, but what we did with Gangsta Grillz and the other artists that were coming up, we really brought the mixtape game to the South, to where it really lived.

I remember a time when I would try to call around and be like, "Hey, I'm DJ Drama, I have this Southern mixtape," and people outside of the South were like, "Eh, nobody's really checking for that.

At the same time that the raid was happening in '07, there was a big change in hip-hop. If you look back at '07, it's really known for being the year of Ringtone Rap. A lot of artists didn't really break that year -- it was songs that got broken.

Some of that I [attribute] to the fact that mixtapes were at a down moment because of what was going on [with the raid], as well as [the Internet]. All this was happening, and a whole new generation came in where it wasn't so much about the hard copies, and they took it to another level of not even having to go to a mixtape site, per se, to get to the music.

Then, my brother and I had been musically divided: a hippy and a punk. But the mixtape is a form of communication that is constrained and individual. It reconstitutes an experience that has been diluted. We can organise playlists of any length and can go on reorganising them at whim.

So why has the idea of the mixtape persisted? More importantly, there is the pleasure of knowing that this arrangement has been made just for you. The mixtape is a unique meeting-point between two people — like a letter or a dance. It remains the best way to let music have your feelings for you. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. Music Music.