2009
Now, the person you gave it to might not like every song, but since they were theoretically compatible with you in some way, they'd like most of them, and in the process of liking most of them, you'd turn them on to something new, perhaps. But then there would be a demonstrable collection of two people that liked the same group of songs, which makes a microtaste (which is inherently singular in nature) in to a macrotaste, and a movement is born.
Anyhow, Elle was postulating that it would be interesting to have a scenario wherein you created a mixtape of some sort, sent it in some fashion to a central clearing house, and got one in return. Being older, we were dwelling on the concept of sending in a CD-R and getting one in return, as the transient nature of the internet doesn't lend itself to this sort of thing, in our opinion. Anyhow, you'd make a CD-R full of the songs that described you, and sent it off, and a couple weeks later, from some other utterly random person, you'd get a completely unrelated CD-R, full of songs that described them. In this fashion, you could get out of your normal self-created shell that the current state of the music industry creates.
This Global Mixtape is just the meme of an idea, and if there's a service or something already existing that does this sort of thing, I'd love to hear about it. Obviously, just doing it as the idea stands now is impossible. There would be massive costs associated with the disparity in postage rates alone, never mind the time associated with actually physically doing the swap. However, I'd love to flesh this idea out in to something that could actually occur, so if anyone has any thoughts on the subject, lay 'em out.
There is no difference between sharing with some-'one' who would not pay to get new music or thousands. The monetary loss is zero in both cases.
(and I mean it as provocative as it suggests)
Also if you choose physical media use CD-RW!
Because what happens if you send a CD-R is that the reciever ripps off the music he likes and throws the CD-R away, since static playlists are dead anyway.
posted December 7, 2009 by dyscode
posted December 8, 2009 by pepezabala
Imagine my younger self dulled by repetitive guitar fuzz only to find Catherine Wheel's "I Want to Touch You" nestled in the middle of some cassette given me by some Vaguely Alluring Girl.
Oh... good times.
posted December 8, 2009 by tubber
Giving it a theme like "5 great songs you've never heard" makes the idea a lot more interesting... but sort of requires that you know the recipient in some way, to have some indication that you're not just retreading well traveled ground for the recipient (there's no point in a "dude, I just discovered this great band called KMFDM" when the recipient already owns everything Wax Trax ever released... possibly bad example, but I'm on the way to the dentist and can't think straight due to the tranquilizers necessary to get me into the chair)
posted December 8, 2009 by Mad Al
I mean, as far as Pandora is concerned, Kenny G and John Coltrane are both jazz, and Air Supply and Ministry are both rock. That's a gross generalization, but you get the idea. Once you've trained a particular station to the point where it isn't throwing Kenny G _and_ Coltrane at you, you've essentially thumbs-downed any song that you don't already know, and created a self-perpetuating loop.
But that said, in a scenario like the one I describe, the danger is, of course, that you get a whole CD-R or flash drive or whatever full of Nickleback. (And CD-RW? Are you shitting me? Who the fuck uses those? I have a _case_ of custom CD-Rs here that I paid like $150 for.) But that's part of the fun, too. There's a lot of shit out there, but like digging for diamonds, you gotta move a lot of coal. You can't just have a plate of diamonds handed to you every time you go down in to the tunnel, else the diamonds themselves become worthless. The work makes the reward all the greater, no?
-CR
posted December 8, 2009 by Chris Randall
Isn't that roughly the same scenario as Pandora giving you lots of Kenny G when you want Coltrane, except you can't thumbs down that shit out of your life?
posted December 8, 2009 by shamann
-CR
posted December 8, 2009 by Chris Randall
posted December 8, 2009 by Darren "Gaylord" Halm
-CR
posted December 8, 2009 by Chris Randall
Maybe in a particular community things would be different. If the readers of this blog all sent mixtapes out I'd expect to have something in common with most of them, and a better chance to enjoy the music.
Pandora doesn't work for me because it's bogged down in the mainstream too much. If I give it Paul Van Dyk, I get an endless parade of PvD and BT and Tiesto stuff that I'm already bored of. If I give it John Mayer, I get an alternating mix of John Mayer and Dave Matthews songs with an occasional Jose Gonzalez thrown in. Again, I've already heard those.
Pandora's very purpose is to keep you within the boundaries of a particular microtaste: "Ah, I see you like trancy songs between 130 and 140 BPM with dreamy female vocals and repetitive motifs."
I'd rather have something people-driven. Amazon occasionally recommends something good to me, for example. The "Genius" feature in iTunes is supposed to do this, but doesn't work.
The modern equivalent of the mixtape-from-a-friend is probably going to be some sort of Facebook "what I'm listening to right now" feature. It probably already exists but I'm too antisocial to know about it.
I'd love to see a "Post 5 songs you love that others might not have heard" thread here. That would be more interesting to me than a random mixtape.
posted December 7, 2009 by Michael Moncur