Ipod killed the mix tape...

I was fortunate enough to have grown up in the 80's where cassette tapes were still a fashionable thing... Remember taping songs off the radio... Everynight I sit by by Radio Cassette player, listening to the top 50, hoping to grab all the songs I wanted... 

When you have a new mix tape, you play it till you either got bored off it or that the tape scratches and dies... Sometimes from tape to tape, certain songs would get carried over for one more tape... now that's the hard part... cos everyone knows when you copy tape to tape, you lose a generation of sound quality...

What about making mix tapes for girls you liked, during different stages of a relationship, certain songs seems to fit together better than others... after awhile, some begin to lose meaning and gets lost when a new tape is made...

During my University years, CD became a common thing, you didn't have to put as much effort into making a mixed CD as opposed to a mixed tape... It was my final year in Uni when Ipods came around... I held out for as long as I could not getting one... cos a CD holds 23 songs at best and when you make a new mixed CD, you have to be very careful with your song selection... My sister got an Ipod and it holds 500 songs... Why would I want 500 songs when I can pick 23 of the best ones I like... it didn't make sense to me...

Nowadays giving a girl a mixed tape says two things... 1) You are really old, 2) you are a weirdo... this is one of those things that technology made obsolete, so now what do you do when you want to give a girl a bunch of songs you like... buy an Ipod, download the songs onto it and give it to her? It just seems pointless now... she'd be saying in her head, hey man, I already got an Ipod, why would I want another one... and if you want me to listen to the songs... just give me the names and I can download them myself...

I do own an Ipod... in fact I own 3, they are all 2 gig versions of the Ipod shuffle... it holds about 300 songs and it's good enough for me... I keep a bunch of sappy love songs in one... the metal/alternative in another for when I hit the gym... the third one I use to listen to podcasts... It might sound stupid, but I am happy carrying around 3 pods with me whereever I go... This way I can go back to the routines of the old days where you have to make a bunch of decisions everytime you sync your pod, you can do it by the mood you are in at that particular moment and put in songs that puts you in that mood... 

The Ipod also changed the way we listen to music and also the way music is made, back in the Tape days, when you listen to a song, you let it play out, cos you know fast forwarding will scratch the tape... Listening to music on an Ipod gives you the power to skip ahead, so when you get a bunch of new songs on your Ipod, you listen to the first 20 seconds of the song, if the melody doesn't catch your attention, you skip ahead... Music makes knows this, that's why more and more songs written nowadays have the lyrics come in almost immediately to make sure you don't skip forward... To me, that is just sad...

Here is one of those songs about making a mix tape from the 90's the end of the mix tape era... Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MELV6h9JPE