In the '80s and '90s, mix tapes were valuable currency in the underground music scene.

Whether you were sharing music with a fellow music lover in Australia, collecting reused tapes from a Seattle-based lo-fi artist named Damien or trying to impress the cute girl in your English class, mix tapes possessed a magic absent from the check-out-this-band-on-MySpace method of sharing music today.

Mix tapes, for all intensive purposes, are gone. But clearly they haven't been forgotten. Their absence seems to have only made the nostalgic hearts of those who traded them all those years ago grow even fonder.

Though not the first, Portland, Ore. photographer Justin Ouellette could become the king of the online mix tape generator if he keeps things up. In less than a week, he has become a Web sensation with Muxtape.com, a site that allows users to generate "muxtapes" and share them via unique Web addresses assigned to each mix.

During the site's first 24 hours, some 8,685 users registered on the site, creating mixes with 19,731 songs and generating another 35,000 visits, according to a posting on Oullette's blog Wednesday.

Oullette called the first surreal 24 hours of the web experiment "the most exciting 24 hours a starry-eyed young web developer could possibly have."

Oullette states in an earlier blog post that he's been working on the site "every spare moment" he's had for the past few weeks." His goal: "nothing short of changing the way we consume, distribute, and discover music."

While no computer simulation will ever take the place of a hand-made cardboard cover with barely legible hand-strewn tracks and the occasional sound of a bad tape dub, Muxtape gets an A-plus for being easy to use and even easier to share with a friend, stranger or love interest.

Still, a mix of Motown love songs I want to send to my fiancee would mean more coming via snail mail in a hand-made package than it would on a Web browser. It's not quite a mix tape since it's in CD format, but it's a lot more personal than a Muxtape.

posted [03.27.08]

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