What is a mixtape?

What are the two meanings of mixtape?

Mixtape has two meanings: a personal mix of songs by many artists, chosen for one person or occasion, and a hip-hop release by a DJ or artist outside the official album schedule.

• The personal mixtape. One person picks songs by many artists and records them in a chosen order, for someone else or for an occasion. A love letter, a road trip soundtrack, a way of saying “this is what I’ve been listening to.” This is the meaning behind the cassettes, the mix CDs and the shared playlists.
• The hip-hop mixtape. A release by a DJ or an artist that sits outside the official album schedule. DJ mixtapes blend and sequence other people’s records; artist mixtapes are collections of the artist’s own tracks, often looser or more experimental, and often given away free.

Context tells you which one someone means. “She made me a mixtape” is the first. “His new mixtape drops Friday” is the second.

How did the personal mixtape move from tape to CD to playlist?

The personal mixtape was a cassette through the 1970s and 1980s, became a burned CD-R in the late 1990s and 2000s, and carries on today as the shared playlist.

The cassette years

The compact cassette, introduced by Philips in the 1960s, made home recording cheap and portable. Through the 1970s and 1980s, home tape decks, and later dual-deck stereos that could copy one tape to another, let anyone record songs from their records, the radio or a friend’s tapes. Portable players such as the Sony Walkman, launched in 1979, meant a mixtape could go everywhere.

Making one took time. Recording happened in real time, so a 90-minute tape took at least 90 minutes, usually more with the rewinding, re-recording and waiting for the DJ to stop talking over an intro. That effort is a large part of why a mixtape came to mean affection. Someone spent an evening on you.

The music industry wasn’t always pleased. In the UK, the record industry ran a “Home Taping Is Killing Music” campaign in the 1980s. People kept taping.

The mix CD

When CD burners became common in home computers in the late 1990s and 2000s, the mixtape moved to disc. A burned CD-R holds about 80 minutes, plays in car stereos, and sounds the same on the hundredth play as the first. The rituals survived: a carefully chosen order, a title in marker, a printed or handwritten tracklist in the case. Many people who say “mixtape” now mean exactly this.

The playlist

Streaming made sharing songs instant and free. A playlist can be a mixtape in spirit when someone picks and orders the songs for one person. What it lost is the object: you can’t hand someone a playlist, write on it, or find it in a drawer ten years later. That gap is a big part of why people still burn mix CDs as gifts.

What is a hip-hop mixtape?

A hip-hop mixtape is a release by a DJ or artist outside the official album schedule, a format that grew out of DJ culture. DJs recorded their live sets and blends, mixes of popular records stitched together with scratches and shout-outs, and sold or passed around the tapes. For fans, those tapes were a way to hear what the best DJs were playing. For DJs, they were a calling card.

Over time, artists took the format over. A rapper could release a mixtape to build a following before signing to a label, to keep fans fed between albums, or to try a sound the official album wasn’t built for. Mixtapes often had the artist rapping over other people’s beats, which an official album would normally need to license. When mixtapes moved online, many were given away as free downloads.

Now that most music is released on streaming services, the line has blurred. Plenty of releases called mixtapes are sold and streamed like albums. In practice the label often says more about how the artist wants a project received, looser and lower-stakes, than about how it’s distributed.

What's the difference between a mixtape and an album?

An album is an artist’s official release of their own songs; a personal mixtape is someone’s selection of other people’s songs, and a hip-hop mixtape is an artist’s looser, often free release. This table puts all three side by side.

For a personal mixtape the difference is simple: an album is one artist telling their story, and a mixtape is you telling a story with everyone else’s songs. The craft is in the choosing and the order. Our guide to how to make a mixtape covers both.

How many songs are on a mixtape?

A mixtape usually holds 18 to 22 songs on an 80-minute CD or 20 to 24 on a C90 cassette. There’s no rule, but the format sets a ceiling, and it has stayed in roughly the same place for decades:

Song counts assume average songs of three and a half to four minutes. Our page on how many songs fit on a CD breaks it down by song length. Hip-hop mixtapes have no standard size; some are a handful of tracks, others run longer than the artist’s albums.

Why do people still make mixtapes?

People still make mixtapes because, with nearly every song in everyone’s pocket, a choice of twenty means more. A mixtape says “I picked these for you, in this order,” and it can’t be reshuffled by an algorithm or quietly edited later.

People still make them for the same reasons they always did:

• To say something hard to say. A song can carry a feeling a card can’t.
• To mark a moment. An anniversary, a move, a graduation, a long drive.
• To share taste. Here’s what I love, and I think you will too.
• To have something to hold. A disc with a cover, a tracklist and a note outlasts a link.

Physical music has had a revival alongside streaming. If you’re curious about the numbers, we looked at them in are CDs coming back? And if you’re making one now, a good title helps: here are 150 mixtape name ideas to start from.

Have the playlist but no CD burner? We’ll burn it to a custom CD mixtape, with a printed tracklist or your photo as the cover.