Mixtape – Art that’s sometimes legal and sometimes not

There is a growing collection of websites dedicated to providing mixtapes which are compilations of songs recorded in a specific order. Sites like 8tracks, Songza, and Seeqpod are growing in popularity day by day. That popularity is highlighted by a site like Favtape which, as this article is going to press, is only displaying the message “Favtape is down due to server crashing issues.” Maybe they will be faring better by the time you are reading this article.

Mixtapes, which is actually a term derived from the words “mixed tape” are nothing new. They first entered into our lexicon with the growth of 8-track tapes in the 1960s. Mixtape enthusiasts believe that by carefully selecting and ordering the tracks in a mix, an artistic statement is created that is greater than the sum of the individual songs. While 8-track players were becoming widely used, 8-track recorders were still expensive and bulky. So these first mixed tapes were typically sold at flea markets or “hippie shops” into the early 1970s.

You’ll note mixtapes were never sold in your commercial music store because they were, and still are, illegal. So, while music piracy is a significant issue world wide, it is an issue with it’s roots in the 1960s. Through the 70s and 80s the mixtapes moved from flea markets to dance clubs and from 8-track to cassette. But, at the end of the day the recording quality was typically poor and distribution channels were limited.

So while the Recording Industry never liked mixtapes, through the 1960s and into the early 1990s they never made a huge deal about them. In recent years that has certainly changed. In 2003 Frank Creighton, then the Director of antipiracy efforts for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), was quoted as saying that “money did not have to be involved for copying to be illegal” and “digital mixes have better sound quality” and given the proliferation of CD burning ”it would be naive of us to say that we should allow that type of activity.”

But before the RIAA could get a handle of the issue of music copying and CDs, along came digital music files on the Internet and hand held music players. And right behind them came Internet music services like Pandora and mixtape sites like 8tracks and Songza.

But before I tell you about what mixtapes you can listen to, I have to mention what you can’t listen to. Muxtape.com launched to great fanfare in March 2008. The site became popular immediately after launching, with 8,685 users registered in its first day and 97,748 in its first month! But by August 2008, Muxtape was offline with the message: “Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.

But don’t despair, for every crisis there is a loophole to the rescue! 8tracks keeps on the right side of the law by making use of a DMCA loophole that allows it to operate as a small online radio station. So while you may think of 8tracks.com as an internet site, it operates as a radio station which means it pays lower licensing fees for the music they stream. The one key is that they don’t list the songs in the playlist – just like when you listen to a radio station you don’t know the songs in advance. Users can create playlists, their term for mixtapes, and they are free to share their playlists with friends. However, you can only play the songs while visiting 8tracks – they don’t empower any downloading of music. They embody the true spirit of the mixtape with the idea that “8tracks believes handcrafted music programming trumps algorithms. Think radio in the 1970s, mixtapes in the 1980s, and DJ culture of the 1990s through today.”

Songza also follows the straight line and right on their about page they state “Songza pays for licenses from all the major performing-rights organizations (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC), who then pay the publishers and writers in proportion to the number of plays they get on Songza.” I’m not sure if their advertising model will cover all the costs and keep this service alive, but when you check out Quantcast you can clearly see the traffic is a coming! With links to Twitter and RSS feeds you can find some really creative ways to promote your playlists to friends and to hookup with playlists from other songza members.

Essayist Geoffrey O’Brien has called the personal mixtape “the most widely practiced American art form.” Sometimes it’s legal, sometimes it’s not. But clearly the last half a century has proven that people love mixing music and they are going to keep finding innovate ways to make mixtape art.

dagsmith
MusicPlayer.me Contributor

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