One of the ideas I had during my ’30 days of ideas’ last month was something I called I Made You A Tape – an online service that allowed you to make mixtapes for a single person, with personalised liner notes.
Ray Kuyvenhoven, a website developer in British Columbia, took that basic idea and made something genuinely amazing.
It’s called Mixtape For You – and it’s awesome. I’ve made one so far (an introduction to Shriekback for a friend of mine), and I’m so impressed with how it works – and how it embodies the intention of what I was trying to do.
How it works
Give your mixtape a title, and enter the name and email address of the person you want to send it to.
Then write a spiel outlining what the mixtape is about in general. Next, upload tracks one at a time. Up to 45 minutes for each ‘side’ of the mixtape, and up to 15MB per track. You can also upload artwork that will get embedded in the final mixtape, and added to the liner notes.
Each track has space for you to write as much as you want about that particular tune.
When you’re done uploading, you hit send. The mixtape is compiled and the original mp3s deleted off the server. An email is sent to your intended recipient with a URL where they can listen to or download your one-off mixtape (you can also listen to it – but nobody else can).
A week later, that mixtape is deleted from the server.
What do they receive?
Your mixtape recipient gets to download two mp3s of up to 45 minute duration: one called Side A; one called Side B.
They also get a very nice PDF of liner notes. The liner notes contain an overall overview of the mixtape, plus titles and durations, as well as individual commentary on each track (why it’s meaningful, etc.).
The best thing
Best thing about it, of course, is that this happened because it was a spare idea I didn’t want to do anything about, and so I just put it out there for anyone who wanted to use it.
Ray has simply gone ahead and made it, and then told me about it once it was done. Better than I could possibly have hoped. I invented something, and it came true because I said it out loud.
Please try it out – and I would absolutely love it if someone made a mixtape for me.
Thanks for sharing some of your ideas. It was fun implementing the Mixtape idea (well mostly fun, testing can get a bit tedious at times).
This is beautiful.
Back in ’82 Uncle Rico, in the film Napoleon Dynamite, could throw a pigskin more a half a mile. Had he come up with this great idea he could have also paid for the best quarterback in the NFL to do this on his front lawn again and again. You know, just for the hell of it.
In short, it would have made him rich.
I think the mixtape has a powerful resonance for people over 25.
In the wake of a few conversations on Twitter a whole spate of blogs and tapes have been written and made.
There’s also a group of people who are now off-line looking to see how the mixtape idea could work as a living, breathing thing in 2010. Will keep you posted.
This is so awesome – I remember loving this idea.
Built and released in 23 days. Amazing.