Stop. Hey. What's That Sound?

My wife and I were having a discussion last night about the Eno/Branca thing (that we talked about in the comments of this post,) and she brought up an interesting point. She said the way to combat the pervasiveness of microtaste in the past was mixtapes. You made a tape for your prospective significant other, or your friend, or whatever, and that tape was a good indication of the fundamental nature of You.

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.