Playlist: 21st Century Mixtape
Music has always been made by people in order to share it. While this was largely done via “real-time” performance until the most recent centuries, the advent of mass media (ie, broadcast radio) and audio recording allowed for music to be distributed and re-distributed like never before. Instead of being limited to the people who were in the room with you, you could have a shared music experience with as many as 30 million people in your country alone.
However, there remained the issue of who had access not only to these distribution channels, but also the content that was being distributed. By the early 1980s, the affordability of cassette tapes and the ease with which they could capture recordings from the radio and other audio sources led to the creation of the “mixtape”: writing for the BBC, novelist Lavinia Greenlaw recalls, “Suddenly I had the opportunity to interfere with the order of things. Rather than put on an album and listen straight through, or leap up and down changing records, I could arrange things exactly as I wanted.” The adoption of this practice within youth culture was enormous, notably romanticized in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. Some have “called the personal mixtape ‘the most widely practiced American art form.’”
As CDs emerged as a viable format, CD-Rs and burners replaced cassettes and tape decks. By the time the MP3 and the iPod arrived, some feared that the dematerialization of music would lead to the death of the personal mix:
“There’s no love or passion involved in moving digital songs from one folder to another… [t]hose ‘mixes’ are just playlists held prison inside a device. There’s no blood, sweat and tears involved in making them.”
In 2016, we find ourselves in a world where streaming services like Spotify have amassed nearly 100 million users, suggesting a level of ubiquity that moves the concept of streaming services as something exotic for only the most trendy music consumers to an everyday technology no less common than a tape deck in the 1980s or CD burner in the early 2000s. Being able to draw from a library 20 million songs (a library so large that almost 20% of the songs have never even been played) means that, if only music fans had some kind of digital mixtape and a way to share it, the options for compilation are approaching infinite.
Meet the playlist: the 21st century’s mixtape. As our ideas of intimacy shift from private to networked, we are increasingly invested in media forms that allow us to share information not hand-to-hand, but over the internet. The speed with which a playlist can be assembled and the depth of content that can be drawn from affords contemporary mixtape makers all of the core tenets of traditional mixtapes with the immediacy internet distribution to friends and strangers alike. In this way, the mixtape lives on in its new form:
“The technique has changed drastically, but the hallmarks remain: shuffling through songs, what order they’ll be in, making sure there’s a seamless transition, setting the mood, the cover art… As long as someone’s willing to keep it alive, the culture can still have a soundtrack.”
Chartmetric in the mix
While professionally curated playlists are proliferating (more on that in our next post), the majority of the 2 billion playlists created on Spotify since 2008 are made by amateurs. Understanding the immense cultural value of playlists (as an extension of the mixtape tradition), Chartmetric provides insight into how the atoms of playlists, songs, are utilized by music fans and how fan-made playlists themselves grow and are shared.
By understanding how playlists are constructed and deployed within social networks, Chartmetric identifies the practices of music consumers and detects trends as they emerge. From this data, Chartmetric can assist in the creation of playlists that target these trends and desires of music consumers, allowing labels and brands to better participate in the music sharing culture of the 21st century.
