Due to licensing restrictions, 8tracks also imposed new constraints on the audio content of mixes: limiting them to a certain number of songs per artist and per album, and automatically shuffling them upon repeat listening. Before long, mixes with lyrical snippets and accompanying graphics other than cover art had become few and far between, and generally limited to fans who hadn’t yet made the leap. Although many fans would crosspost their 8tracks fanmixes to Tumblr for increased visibility, Tumblr similarly made annotations cumbersome to format, and the effort seemed contrary to 8tracks’s ease and simplicity. In practice, however, 8tracks’s support for annotations was so limited and temperamental they often weren’t worth the trouble. For the first time, fans had an easy way of creating, sharing, and consuming fanmixes in a single online location. Finally, unlike file-sharing websites, 8tracks offered inbuilt support for some of the annotations that typically accompanied fanmixes at the time, such as one-sided cover art and textual track annotations for lyrics. Thanks to a partnership with Soundcloud, 8tracks even made compiling mixes easier, too, with fans no longer needing to own a song in order to use it. With its focus on social networking, 8tracks offered fans many of the same capabilities as LiveJournal-liking, bookmarking, and commenting on each other’s content-while also making streaming a viable alternative to the more cumbersome file-sharing for listening to mixes. 8tracks proved to be a game changer for fanmix communities, but the impact wasn’t immediately obvious. 8tracks, a website for curating and sharing audio playlists, was launched and immediately became a hit with fans online. In August 2008, the fanmix landscape underwent a dramatic shift.
8TRACKS MOVE PLAYLISTS IN LISTEN LATER PASSWORD
Fanmixes were shaped around these restrictions, with etiquette developing around link sharing, uploading individual tracks on request, password protection, and warnings for particularly graphic-heavy content. Was this a fanmix about Han Solo and Leia’s epic love, for instance, or one charting Anakin Skywalker’s corruption? With potentially slow Internet connections to reckon with, it was especially important to get a feel for a fanmix before committing to the work of downloading it, unzipping it, and queueing it for listening. Aside from their musical content, they often came with annotations, the way you might enclose a tracklist and some doodlings in a mixtape. When I first came across them, fanmixes were also surprisingly sprawling, mixed-media things. Some attempt to use songs appropriate to the era of their subject-such as this Peggy Carter fanmix-while others prioritize musical or lyrical appropriateness over historical accuracy. Some fanmixes tell a story, while others focus on capturing a mood or embodying a theme or character.
![8tracks move playlists in listen later 8tracks move playlists in listen later](https://buildersdopca.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/6/7/126740983/852617404_orig.jpg)
For me, as for many, it started out as writing, and then I discovered fanmixes.Īs with most fan creations, fanmixes vary widely according to individual styles and preferences.
![8tracks move playlists in listen later 8tracks move playlists in listen later](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/fGHUxHN34ng/maxresdefault.jpg)
For some, it was a question of writing it out in fan-fiction for others, making fanart of the characters they loved so much. Not only did they feel the same - they’d even found something to do with the feeling. Online, there were people who felt the same way about Artemis and his friends as I did, and with the same fervor. Back home, in the designated computer room of our house, I found a place: the Internet.