G-SPOT: How I miss the good old days of creating your own mixtapes

Once upon a time, in fact, not that long ago, I physically owned a whole stash of Compact Discs (CDs) that I had bought and which contained most of my favourite music.

I also still had audio cassettes on which I had recorded music off the radio, as well as from vinyl and CDs over the years.

Sadly, when I was repatriating, I could not economically justify bringing all my music back with me. The boxes were too heavy, and I was forced to give it away. 

This, plus giving away my DVDs, a few video cassette box collections, and many of my books, was one of the hardest things I have ever done. I still feel a twinge from the pain of separation, but I will get over it, eventually.

I had curated this music for decades, at least since the mid-1980s, and a lot of it, especially the tape recordings, was tied up with sentimental value and memories of when and how the music was recorded.

Modern youths will probably never know the skill, patience and frustration of recording a favourite song off the radio. It was a ritual that defined music ownership for millions before the Internet. A game of patience, timing and quick reflexes.

You would sit by the radio, finger hovering over the button, waiting for the DJ to introduce your favourite song. All the time hoping the DJ did not interrupt the tune with chatter or, worse yet, a jingle or advert. A “clean” recording without the DJ’s voice was considered a trophy.

It was this era that birthed the mixtape, a curated physical gift that carried emotional weight because of the hours of manual labour required to record it.

It is true that recording music off the radio was piracy and not to be encouraged, even though everyone was doing it. At the same time, however, unlike today’s strict digital tracking, recording off the radio was largely untraceable and protected by the concept of “home taping”.

The music industry even launched a campaign against home taping. They feared that if people could record for free, they would stop buying records. Instead, it actually helped songs go viral by word of mouth.

Eventually, in many places, courts ruled that recording music for personal, non-commercial use was legal. It was seen as “time-shifting”, or listening to the broadcast at a later time.

Recording off the radio was the first time people took control of their own libraries, moving away from only buying what was in the record shops.

The media was tied to physical objects. People ‘owned’ their memories and music in the form of printed photo albums, vinyl records, cassettes and CDs.

If you had the object, you had the media. Ownership was absolute; you could sell, trade or gift your records and photos without anyone’s permission.

The main downside, for there is always one, was physical degradation: photos faded, tapes ‘stretched’ or broke.

Then came the rise of technology and the emergence of the personal computer, which led people to move their music from CDs to iTunes and to scan their physical photos onto hard drives. At the time, it seemed like progress, but with hindsight, to me at least, it now looks like the beginning of the end.

This era was defined by running out of space. Users frequently had to delete photos or buy external hard drives to keep their libraries growing. Many people lost years of photos during this time because they were stored on a single phone or computer that eventually crashed or was lost.

I have had to rebuild my collection of music digitally on various streaming platforms, and while it serves its purpose to a point, deep down, I am not okay with this.

Yes, the ‘cloud’ has solved the storage problem, but it has also fundamentally changed what it means to ‘own’ something. I genuinely feel technology has eroded traditional ownership in favour of licensing and shared access.

As my small protest, I am still holding on to my physical books, which I own outright, rather than e-books for which I can only purchase a licence to use under specific conditions.

I long for the days before the cloud, when books and music lived on shelves.