I'VE always loved mixtapes - making and receiving them. Helen made one for us when Jones was born in 2007, to play in the car (yes, we still had a tapedeck in in the old Mazda 121) as we drove home from the hospital. We both cried listening to the songs that were the first songs our daughter ever heard.
Nowadays, I guess they're called mix CDs (or mix memory sticks or whatever). The nice thing about them is the fact that someone cares enough about you to share his/her musical tastes with you in the hope that you will like/love some of the songs they send you.
What's changed in this digital era is the ease that you can then get into a particular artist you hear on the mixtape: checking out a few videos by them on YouTube and, if you're impressed, buying a CD or two on eBay/Amazon/iTunes/wherever.
Recently, an old friend sent me a memory stick filled with a bunch of random tunes. We play it a lot in the car and the kids really got into the songs, too...to the point where my 3yo demanded "track listings", so I had to make him a fake CD cover to read.
I was already into a couple of artists my mate included - The The, Lydia Lunch and Laura Veirs - which goes to show he and I both have great taste in music. But his gift opened my mind to a slab of indie artists - Lovers, Bailter Space, Imperial Teen, Kinski and Psychic Ills - and a legend, Neil Young, who I'm now getting into for the first time.
Y'know, the way we acquire new music may be changing as we exit 2013 and hurtle towards 2014, but the ways we HEAR about new music remains the same. For ezample, we'll always have friends who wanna make mixtapes to give us, and I think that's cool.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkidm2Oxnnc
Long story short, thanks for the mixtape, Dames.