Making A Mixed Tape
| Field | Music, Romance |
| Went Obsolete | The late 1990s |
| Made Obsolete By | Recordable CDs?, Music download sites, lack of creativity |
| Knowledge Assumed | working knowledge of your cassette deck/ your target audience |
| When useful | when trying to woo that certain "someone" |
A mixtape is a compilation of songs recorded in a specific order, traditionally onto a compact audio cassette.
A mixtape reflects the musical tastes of its compiler, and often links these tastes to the romantic aspirations of the compiler.
Essayist Geoffrey O'Brien once called the mix tape "the most widely practiced American artform" and many mix tape compilers have used this artform to express one's feelings through another person's art.
Many believed that by carefully selecting, ordering and mixing tracks (through the artful use of the pause button on your cassette deck) you can make an artistic or romantic statement bigger than the sum of the tape's individual tracks.
To quote Rob Gordon from High Fidelity:
"The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don’t wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules."