What about the end? The evolution from mixtape to playlist.
With over 5 million playlists being created or edited every single day, just on Spotify alone — it is safe to say, Playlists are the most popular form of music listening today. Playlists are the mixtape of the 21st century.
Yes, they are a hell of a lot easier to create than a mixtape on those old cassettes. But this ease of use has made us a bit more complacent and we have lost something truly magical about the mixtape. The ending.
The perfect mixtape tells a story. It has a beginning, a middle and also very importantly, an end.
When we created a mixtape — real estate was sparse and we were bound by time (60/90 minutes), so we needed to choose our tracks wisely. We had to be cut-throat with our selection and make sure we put the songs in the right order. A lot of careful planning and editing was required. These restraints actually made for a better mixtape.
Sure, today we can edit the playlist a million times over, but because of that we are a lot more forgiving with our own track selection and more importantly, we don’t really think…
