I don't like the limitations of cassettes, but in their heyday, they readily handled the important social activity of music swapping: * ubiquity: everyone had

I don't like the limitations of cassettes, but in their heyday, they readily handled the important social activity of music swapping: * ubiquity: everyone had a tape player at home. The cool kids had portable players * uniqueness: people did not have _your mixtape_ unless you gave it to them. You wrote/drew on the inlay to personalize it and make it yours * contemplation: you couldn't just seek straight to particular tracks, you'd typically listen to the whole thing, give it your full attention * peer-to-peer: no third parties involved * cost: tapes were cheap enough that you wouldn't be ruined if someone didn't give a tape back * the object itself: they're a nice size and shape so they don't easily get lost. You need to handle them to play the music. They remind you they're there, they remind you of the person who gave them to you This continued in the 1990s/2000s with CD-Rs, but the flatness of them and that you generally dumped the audio off the CD-R onto your hard drive meant that they ended up in piles and you forgot about them. Unless people went to extra effort to burn a single-track mix, you just ripped them and merged them into your own collection and the attribution that your friend gave you it was lost. You didn't have to listen to the whole thing at once, you paid less attention to it. Nowadays, you're screwed. You could put files on a flash drive, but those are easily lost and always expensive. You _will_ miss them when they're lent out, and most I've ever lent out have never come back. They're only ever a conduit for files, good luck writing a tracklisting on the side of them. If you're just hosting the files on the internet, there's no physical object to remind people any more. That said, it is still nice for people to upload things for each other to a shared dropbox, and people still appreciate a "DJ mix" you've made with as a single file with its own artwork, but I'd say that requires a bit more effort than putting mixtapes together did.