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Hmm, while I am probably too young to have made mixtapes on cassette tapes, it is absolutely the case that people made lots of mixtapes for each other on CDs in the mp3 and CD-burning heyday. Perhaps this is to your point that music was incredibly expensive prior to being forced down by mp3 pirating (we can call it what it was while also acknowledging that the labels and artists deserved it). But I am pretty willing to take media's word that music nerds made each other mixtapes back in the day. What is kind of funny is that I do not really think people make playlists for each other today; it seems like it has gotten too cheap! (Though maybe I am too old now. What does happen is my wife texts me 20 different songs instead of making a playlist like I beg her to!)
On The Jesus and Mary Chain, I think it is quite possible to have been exposed to them via college radio (I still discover obscure things via college radio) or even a relatively alternative, err, alternative station. JMC has a few very melodic songs that could easily have been championed by DJs or older siblings.
In my experience of the 90's "I made you a mixtape/burned CD" would have been kind of wierd and overly personal. "I made one for all of us to listen to in the car", OTOH, was normal and exciting.
And FWIW, I remember my goth friends in the late 90's early 2000's talking about Joy Division, which I think I have still never listened to in any capacity.
If you're talking about '99 onward it was an entirely different situation as Napster made a whole world of music available that hadn't been accessible before, and the internet made music discovery a lot easier. I had heard of Joy Division in the '90s, but only because as a music nerd I had a bunch of record review guides (which are sitting on a bookshelf behind me as I type this). I had no particular interest in them, but trying to find well-reviewd records from major bands was a chore because you were at the mercy of what the record store had in stock. Floor space was limited, and they had to stock CDs and cassettes, so they were only going to carry what they could sell, which meant mostly new releases and compilations. It seems odd to think about now, but as someone who was a huge Beatles fan I don't recall any record store having all their studio albums in stock at the same time, even after the surge in interest generated by the Anthology documentary. The Anthology compilations, which are collections of unreleased material that nobody cares about any more, were always well-stocked, on the other hand. What people liked was largely defined by what was available, and unless there was some big cultural change, catalog releases that didn't sell well to begin with weren't likely to be available outside of special order, which was usually limited to independent shops in urban areas that high school kids didn't shop at.
Yeah, I went through adolescence right during that transition. There was a kind of an awkward midpoint where downloaded songs were very common, but only a few people I knew had a proper CD burner, so having all that newly accessible music in a portable format (or for anything other than computer speakers) was somewhat more special. This was especially relevant as we started getting cars.
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Surely you've heard "Love Will Tear Us Apart".
I've heard it once, and it's simply a terrible song when performed by a single-note-range vocalist. This version is miles better than the original.
For that heresy, I will tie you to a chair and force you to listen to the eight-minute extended remix of Vienna, you heathen!
Well if original Joy Division isn't good enough for you, how about when they became New Order?
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After giving it 30s, I can confidently say I have never heard that song in my life.
I'm genuinely surprised.
Kids these days, eh?
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Growing up in the 90s, I recall some of my friends sharing tapes with recordings of songs from the radio and CDs with each other. But what I don't recognize is people calling them "mixtapes." That was something you might share specifically with your boy-/girlfriend as a way to convey your affection, and the exact specific order mattered. Tapes you shared with friends were just tapes that had songs on them, because merely having the song available for play - even with the delay it takes to rewind/fast forward the tape to the specific track - was something very valuable.
I don't remember anyone in the 90s making tapes for their boyfriend or girlfriend, just people occasionally making tapes for friends, but the order never mattering. If you had a CD with three really good songs on it you wanted to include you'd just put them one after the other and then go to the next CD. Like you said, just having a copy of the song was the point, because music was expensive. "Mixtape" is a term from hip hop that got appropriated for the phenomenon after people stopped buying cassettes. Even in High Fidelity, they're called compilation tapes, but most people didn't call them anything. When we first got a car with a tape deck in it circa 1995 my mom borrowed a bunch of my uncle's CDs and made a tape that she proceeded to play in the car ad nauseum for the next several years. We always called it "The Tape". I remember getting sick of it and finding another tape that my other uncle had made her from stuff dubbed of of albums in the '80s, and we called it "The Other Tape".
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Yeah I didn't grow up with cassettes but my parents had a large collection. My mom in particular had a bunch of mixtapes that people had given her in the 80s and 90s
I remember the dual sided cassette tapes being brought out from storage for Christmas holiday songs when I was very young. And needing to rewind them too. Hard to believe time goes by so fast.
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