Song sharing is one of the most—if not the most—vital parts of music fandom. A hundred years ago, the medium was the phonograph record. Today, whether on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube, the playlist ...

“The smooth criminal on beat breaks / Never put me in your box if your shit eats tapes,” rapped Nas on his 1994 classic “N.Y. State of Mind.” Like other underground genres that hit their stride in the ...

Affordable blank cassette tapes in the late 1970s turned ordinary listeners into curators, giving everyone the tools to share music on their own terms. The order of songs on a mixtape was never random ...

There’s a scene that anyone who came up in hip-hop culture in the late 90s or early 2000s remembers clearly: walking into a record shop, a barbershop, or a street vendor’s spot and picking up a tape ...