Free Republic

Like some sort of minimalist muggins who watches too many TV property shows, I recently embarked on a “decluttering” mission. One thing I couldn’t bring myself to declutter (OK, throw out - let’s stop dressing it up with poncey buzzwords) were my old mixtapes. I’ll probably never play them again. Indeed, I’ve barely got the means to do so - my last remaining cassette deck nearly got decluttered too. But just rummaging through them sent me tumbling down a retro rabbit hole. There were tapes made for summers, Christmases, road trips, festivals and dirty weekends. Tapes I made for old...

Not content with the current (and already massive) statutory damages allowed under copyright law, the RIAA is pushing to expand the provision. The issue is compilations, which now are treated as a single work. In the RIAA's perfect world, each copied track would count as a separate act of infringement, meaning that a copying a ten-song CD even one time could end up costing a defendant $1.5 million if done willfully. Sound fair? Proportional? Necessary? Not really, but that doesn't mean it won't become law. The change to statutory damages is contained in the PRO-IP Act that is currently up...

The back cover of “Southern Smoke 27” also says something about the current status of mixtapes. It’s chock-a-block with corporate logos: BET, MTV and Geffen Records (Field Mob’s label) are all represented, and there are advertisements for DJ Smallz’s syndicated radio shows (on both satellite — Sirius — and terrestrial radio). “Southern Smoke 27” is a corporate-sponsored CD, even though you can’t legally buy it, which means that it’s probably also an endangered species; the era of major-label bootlegs can’t last forever. But then, mixtapes aren’t supposed to last forever. Like magazines, which they resemble in both price and energy,...

Not long left for cassette tapes Last Updated: Friday, 17 June, 2005, 08:02 GMT 09:02 UK Some 40 years after global cassette production began in earnest, sales are in terminal decline. From its creation in the 1960s through to its peak of popularity in the 1980s, the cassette has been a part of music culture for 40 years. But industry experts believe it does not have long left, at least in the West. The cassette may have hissed, been prone to wow and flutter, and often ended its life chewed in a tape deck, but it ruled for four decades...