There are the people who overthink making mix CDs and playlists, and how that works generationally is all really interesting to me.
I grew up in the time just when cassettes were waning and CDs were growing. And so mix tapes - and not mix CDs - mix tapes were an important part of the friendship and mating rituals of New York adolescents. If you were a girl and I wanted you - to show you I like you, I would make you a 90-minute cassette wherein I would show off my tastes. I would play you a musical theater song next to a hip-hop song next to an oldie next to some pop song you maybe never heard, also subliminally telling you how much I like you with all these songs.
When albums gave way to CDs, people re-discovered their collection through their CDs.
In my late teens and early 20s, I started selling mix CDs on the street.
I actually don't listen to CDs very often. I listen to the radio or if I do listen to a CD, it'll be a mix.
Even as a teenager, when I made mix CDs for people, it all had this sort of track flow: I like to start off very in-your-face, and kind of chill out towards the end and have this almost, like, denouement.
No one listens to CDs anymore. Who even owns a CD? I used to bring my CDs to shows, and it was, like, a guarantee that everyone would buy one. Nope! Not anymore.
My first love was basketball, but that wasn't gonna launch me, and I knew I had to get into other things. So me and my friends, we started making mix CDs and going down to South Beach or to the parking lot at Pitbull concerts to spend all night hustling.
I'm a Beatles fan, and I remember in the mid-1980s, when CDs first came out, there was a sound of vinyl and the sound of the needle on it that people loved, and suddenly CDs were threatening.
First of all, don't mix your hairpins up with mine! You .... Oh! All right, mix your muck with mine. Mix it! Mix your rags with my tatters! Mix it all up.
I remember, when I was a kid, my dad would subscribe to the BMG Music Club, and we got that initial 12 CDs for a penny... I think it was cassettes. Eight CDs or 12 cassettes, something like that.
One thing I always hated with CDs is when people started putting 65 to 75 minutes on their albums.
People equated burning CDs with theft. That's not what burning CDs is. Theft is about acquiring the music from the Internet.
When you mix a record that someone else is on, you've got to send it to them. They've got to like the mix, you got to like the mix, the producer's got to like the mix. Too many people are involved!
I've always bought CDs and even when I was young and at primary school I had a massive collection of CDs. I just like the excitement of opening it, reading the book, learning all the words and things like that. Hopefully I'll always be like that.
People like Busta Rhymes would say, 'Clinton Sparks doesn't do mix tapes; he does albums. He just throws albums out on the street.'