A Short History of the Mixtape
The mixtape began as a side effect. The Compact Cassette was meant for dictation, and it took most of two decades before people used it to tell each other how they felt.
A Format for Dictation
Philips introduced the Compact Cassette in 1963, from a team led by the engineer Lou Ottens. It was small, it needed no threading, and Philips licensed it to other manufacturers free of charge, which is a large part of why it became the standard. The early tape was narrow and slow, made for voices rather than music.
Good Enough for Music
Better tape and noise reduction changed that over the 1970s. Dolby noise reduction cut the hiss, chrome tape held more of the high end, and a home cassette deck could now record a record or the radio at a quality people were happy to listen to. Anyone with two decks or a stereo with a tape slot could make a compilation in their living room.
Personal and Portable
Sony's Walkman went on sale in 1979 and made the cassette something you carried. Car stereos and boomboxes did the same for groups of people. In New York, DJs sold tapes of their sets, and the word mixtape still means a rapper's or a DJ's own release today.
Home Taping Is Killing Music
The record industry noticed. In the early 1980s the British Phonographic Industry ran its Home Taping Is Killing Music campaign, with a cassette drawn as a skull and crossbones. It did little to stop anyone, and the logo turned up on a good number of homemade tapes.
Rules for a Good Tape
By the 1990s the mixtape had a literature. Nick Hornby's 1995 novel High Fidelity treats making one as a craft with rules, and the 2000 film carried them to a bigger audience. In 2004 Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth edited Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture, a book of tapes people had made and the stories behind them.
After the Tape
Burned CDs took over from cassettes, and then the playlist took over from both. iTunes arrived in 2001 and Spotify in 2008, and making a compilation went from an evening's work to a few minutes. The playlist made the mix easy and endless, and lost the length limit and the handwritten label along the way.
Why It Still Works
A tape had a start, an order and an end, and someone had chosen every song on it for you. A playlist can have all of that again if you give it a length and a label. Here is how to make one from a YouTube playlist.