My late father, Methodist Church organist Dennis Currin (1932-2017), once observed with typical paternal insight: “You are still making mixtapes like you did as a teenager, just the technology has improved.”
He was absolutely right, of course. The urge to share music, to say “listen to this” or “this made me think of you”, that’s never gone away. Only the delivery mechanism has changed.
The Cassette Years: Where It All Began
I started making mixtapes in the late 60s as a pre-teen. Sometimes you’d think carefully about flow and sequence, other times you’d just throw together whatever you were into that week. But you’d always write out the track listing in your neatest handwriting on the cassette sleeve, maybe add some artwork if you were feeling ambitious, usually clipped from magazines. I also archived this information in hardcover books, eventually comprising 8 volumes.
And there was an unwritten rule: no silence. You could never leave a gap blank at the end of a side. That was unthinkable. You’d need to find something to fill whatever space remained, something shorter than a normal song, 1 minute 23 seconds perhaps, which is how you’d end up discovering that Black Sabbath’s “Orchid” or Genesis’s “Horizons” were the perfect length to complete a side. Necessity bred discovery.
The mixtape was currency among friends. It was how you said things without actually having to say them out loud, because teenagers aren’t particularly good at that sort of thing.
The CD-R Revolution: Digital Precision
Jump to the early 2000s, and suddenly we had CD burners. No more tape hiss, no more degradation after the fifteenth play, no more flipping the cassette over mid-journey. You could fit 80 minutes on a single disc, and the songs sounded exactly as they did on the original.
Every Christmas, for a few years, my friends and family would receive mix CDs. Everyone got the same one, like the 2003 “Braaiing with Brian” edition, a perfect soundtrack for standing around the fire with mates. Mixtapes had purposes: road trips, braais, special occasions like 40th birthdays, and so much more. Each one tailored for a specific moment.
The CD-R era also meant you could be more adventurous with your selections. Want to throw in old radio adverts, theme tunes, even brief spoken word sections from films and TV shows between the music? No problem. The technology gave you more freedom to experiment.
Building the Digital Infrastructure
Around this time, I was also building The South African Rock Encyclopedia and it’s text-only news outlet the SA Rock Digest. Early days of music websites, when streaming wasn’t even a concept. We were dealing with text, images, reviews, news, but no audio. The technology and bandwidth simply weren’t there yet.
Same impulse, though: share music, connect people with bands they might not have discovered otherwise. We were making mixtapes in written form.
Navigating the Legal Minefield
Then came 2002 and SAmp3.com, which was an interesting experiment. Whilst the major labels were busy suing Napster and its ilk into oblivion, we took a different approach. We worked directly with artists, labels, and music rights agencies, only using explicitly approved tracks as free downloads.
For South African artists especially, this was a brilliant marketing tool. They could reach audiences they’d never have accessed through traditional radio or retail channels. But everything had to be cleared, approved, licensed. The mixtape maker in me chafed at these restrictions, even whilst understanding their necessity.
The Streaming Era: Freedom at Last
Then streaming arrived. First YouTube, then Spotify. Suddenly, you could create playlists without worrying about copyright infringement, without needing physical media, without any barriers beyond an internet connection.
This is where we are now. The Playlists and Mixes page is essentially a digital continuation of those mixtapes from the late 60s.
I can create a playlist that jumps from Freedoms Children to McCully Workshop, throw in some international context, add deep cuts that casual listeners might never discover, and share it instantly with anyone, anywhere. Like the playlist that accompanies the post Rock Music 55 Years Ago: A South African Legacy.
C90: Classic Rock 1970
The sequence still matters when you want it to. Other times, you just dump in twenty tracks you’ve been obsessed with lately and hit share.
And here’s the thing: playlists are the antidote to algorithms. Spotify’s Discover Weekly is fine, but it’s based on data patterns and listening habits. A human-made playlist? That’s based on instinct, passion, maybe a bit of mischief. It’s about saying “trust me on this one” rather than “the algorithm thinks you’ll like this.”
Tropical Cruise Vibes
A playlist created for a recent Compucruises blog post: Cruise Your Way: The Freedom of Flexible, Freestyle Sailing
The More Things Change…
My father’s observation cuts to the heart of it. The teenager hunched over a cassette recorder in the late 60s and the adult curating Spotify playlists in 2025 are doing exactly the same thing. We’re sharing what we love, introducing people to new sounds, using music to build connections.
The delivery method has evolved from magnetic tape to optical media to streaming, but the impulse remains wonderfully, stubbornly unchanged. Some things are too fundamental to be disrupted by technology.
They just get better tools.
Explore the current incarnation of this lifelong obsession on the Playlists and Mixes page, where decades of mixtape-making experience meets modern streaming convenience.