This website is a digital archive project featuring a collection of music mixes - owned by no one, though many are addressed to someone. I find music mixes interesting because they don’t exist to any one institution, they are purposefully personal. They don’t act as archives of music in the same way that a record collection would, but they are in the business of preserving copies, whether that be borrowed from Spotify or pirated audio files. This project acts as an archive of how my peers and I consume, curate, share, and listen to music, a process as immaterial as the digital website it’s being recorded in.

Generously shared by friends, The Mixes up top are a few users’ Daily Mixes, algorithmically curated by Spotify and the ultimate example of an “unfixed” archive. Even if I were to never touch this website again, the contents of those links will change every single day.

On the left hand side, you’ll find the collections themselves: Cds, Tapes, Digital Mixes, along with a couple monthly playlists from the Personal Archives.

• 202smike. (2018, June 25). Mixtapes v. Playlists: Medium, Message, Materiality. Sounding Out! https://soundstudiesblog.com/2018/06/25/mixtapes-v-playlists-medium-message-materiality/
• Aasman, S. (2019). Finding Traces in YouTube’s Living Archive: Exploring Informal Archival Practices. TMG Journal for Media History, 22(1), 35. https://doi.org/10.18146/tmg.435
• De Kosnik, A. (2016). Queer and Feminist Archival Cultures: The Politics of Preserving Fan Works. In Rogue Archives. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10248.003.0008
• De Kosnik, A. (2019). Piracy Is the Future of Culture. Third Text, 34(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2019.1663687
• De Kosnik, A. (2012). The Collector is the Pirate. International Journal of Communication, 6, 529–541.
• Ernst, W. (2012). Digital memory and the archive. University of Minnesota Press.
• Hogan, M. (2015). The Archive as Dumpster. Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.25071/2369-7326.39565
• Winter, F. L. (2022). Levels and loot: archives in video games. Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/20004214.2022.2064598