The lost joy of cassette mixtapes

I spotted this in the local record shop today. As I child of the 70s/80s it's fascinating to see old tech make a comeback. I never had an actual Walkman, just a Matsui knock-off from Dixons but it was good enough for my collection of TDK D60s. It wasn't the tech that made cassettes fun though – it was the making of mixtapes.

When the Discman arrived people had no way of burning their own CDs, so mixtapes started to die off. These days you can make playlists (which are essentially mixtapes) on Spotify or wherever, but it's just not the same. You can create them in minutes, and put hundreds of tracks on them, but that dilutes the experience. 

The constraints of cassettes were what made them special. You only had 60 minutes (90 at a push), you had to create them in real-time by listening to each track as it was recorded, you had to nail the programming of tracks in advance, and you had to carefully write the tracklisting on the inlay. Mixtapes took a while to put together and demanded a lot of thought. They were a proper labour of love to be cherished, not listened to on shuffle once and forgotten about.

Hopefully the new generation who are buying these cassette players are back making mixtapes again, not buying expensive albums to own on cassette which always was the worst (sonically) way to own music.