The Digital Age Killed the Lost Art of the Mix Tape

Photo by the author, Carolyn McCoy

BY CAROLYN MCCOY

German engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg unveiled a new audio compression tool in the early 90s, breaking open the future of digital music and streaming services with the advent of the MP3. When digital downloads began to surpass CD sales in 2002, I still preferred CDs and tapes for my musical experiences. Yet to my dismay, the tides were turning, and modern music consumers were quite happy to adapt to the ease of having music available at the touch of their fingertips or command of the voice: “Intelligent Listening Device, please play all of The Allman Brothers discography in alphabetical order…at volume 4.” 

We are told that digital music services have created a level playing field so that lesser-known bands have a fighting chance for notoriety against the more nationally recognized bands. The reality is that independent musicians are lucky if they get payouts valued at the cost of a cup of coffee, let alone anything that could support them. One musician I know got his payouts from Spotify totaling $0.98 for a year of streaming hits on Apple Music. Luckily, there are streaming services like Bandcamp that allow smaller bands and musicians to set their song pricing, reap more of what they make for songs, as well as create options for selling band merchandise. But even then, it’s still a struggle for smaller bands to make a living, so if you’re going to have a streaming service, Bandcamp is the one that will truly help you support lesser-known artists.

I feel with all this technology we have lost the art of honoring songs, honoring artists, and what they create for us. The digital age is a wondrous time but at what cost to art in the face of profits? 

Music has always been a commodity, but in our current age of digital streaming services, when you can access any song at any given moment, I feel that music has become just another “easy to get, easy to throw away” item. Here today and gone tomorrow. Our musical playlists now change like the wind. Has that ease created lazy music listeners? Maybe.

Many of my peers may disagree, but I believe that the digital age of music has taken away one unique experience that I appreciated when I was a growing and budding music fan: the experience of listening to music slowly, purposefully, and with great consciousness. It was not all that long ago that we had to wait patiently for hours in line at a record store so we could be the first to acquire that long-awaited new album by that great band. There was the romance of anticipation for that moment where, after waiting and waiting, our non-internet radio stations finally played that song that we love so much. There was a feeling of slow courtship with a song or album, compared to current days of a “swipe left, swipe right” music listening experience. In addition, we are no longer in a time where there is a large rotation of songs being played on the now corporate-backed commercial airwaves. It’s homogenized, sterilized, and mainlined into your brain for maximized profits. So much great music is being lost and forgotten.

This brings me to my point: Video may have killed the radio star, as the UK band The Buggles stated in their 1979 song, but the Digital Age has killed the lost art of The Mix Tape. 

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, I made about 25 tapes of songs that were important to me. The songs I chose were so pivotal in my life that I needed to sit patiently in front of my boombox for hours to create a soundscape of my reality that sonically reflected the time of my life when the tape was made. Musical diaries or a Soundtrack Of My Life, if you will. My moods, events, feelings, and thoughts were expressed with all the tapes I painstakingly recorded, each having its one-of-a-kind insert with hand-decorated covers, and each song hand-written on the inside liner of the insert. Of the original 25, I have three remaining tapes made between 1984 and 1993.

To this day, I still believe mix tapes were the finest love letters that ever existed.

— (((BrokeAssStuart))) (@BrokeAssStuart) May 31, 2021

Copyright laws were not something anyone thought about back in the 1980s, no one cared and music corporations were not suing individual music lovers for making copies of music, unlike now. 

Listening to my mixtapes helps me remember a time when music meant something more. A time when songs were not so easy to toss aside, and we were not force-fed crappy schlock that is mass-produced in a Musical Bubblegum Factory of computers and auto-tune showcasing artists that don’t necessarily have talent. They remind me of so many past experiences within the lyrics and music. With each song and each tape, I am transported back to various aspects of my distant self. The tapes contained genre-bending mixes with such classics as Toni Basil’s “Oh Mickey!”, Ratt’s “Round & Round”, The Cars “Living In Stereo”, Moon Unit Zappa’s “Valley Girl”, .38 Special’s “So Caught Up In You”, Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock ‘N Roll” on my earlier tapes. As I grew and changed, my tastes did so as well, incorporating songs from Bruce Cockburn, Joan Baez, Flock Of Seagulls, Def Leppard, Eddie Money, and some Judas Priest thrown in to satisfy my inner metal-head. 

To this day, these songs on my tape mixes still have such an impact on my life. They remind me that I have always loved music and that music has provided solace, sanity, and release for me in many times of trouble. Music has the profound power of transporting me to places other than “now” and “here”, all while keeping me anchored to the present. These songs are still special to me, and I have not lost my joy in listening to them. 

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