The best thing that happened in the last 20 years was the advent of the MP3. The MP3 made the best songs from the whole glorious history of music available to anyone, anywhere, as long as they had access to an internet connection.
The result? The return of the mix tape, in a convenient all-in-one-place format. If you want to make a playlist of the best songs for a party; the best songs for a road trip; the best songs for anything at all: you just trawl the net, download your tunes and burn them to a CD. Or stick them in an iTunes style playlist and get your MP3 player ready to pump out the best songs for whatever, whenever you need them.
The great thing about making MP3 “mix tapes” is this: you can get hold of the best songs for whatever mood you happen to be in instantly, without having to trawl through record shops and borrow CDs off your friends. When you’re making your current hit list of the best songs ever, you don’t have to spend hours dragging and dropping single tracks from CDs you haven’t played in years, or (remember this?) hunker down next to a double tape deck, trying to hit “pause” before the beginning of the next track ruins your flow. The best songs in the world, these days, sit in someone else’s hard drive, waiting for you to come along and pull them out.
MP3 playlists mean you can keep track of your personal DJ sets in a way you never could with tapes or CDs. Remember when you made compilations of the best songs in the universe, played ‘em for a while and then dumped them in favour of the next lot? Two years later you were left wondering whatever happened to that CD of the best songs for summer. No more. Now, all you have to do is compile a list of the best songs for summer and store it on your PC. When you feel the urge to make a new list of the best songs you can think of, you don’t lose the old one – it stays there, waiting patiently for the day you think to play it again. And you can have multiple lists of the best songs for all sorts of things – mornings, running, driving, having a night in with your other half – without requiring shelves full of badly-labelled cassettes or CDs.
The mix tape of the best songs for… is back. Way more convenient than it ever was. So spin that beat, Mr DJ – whatever your mood.
