Mixcrate

» see mixcrate.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Mixcrate was built for DJs, and I was never a DJ. It came out of the bay area mobile-DJ scene in november 2009, made by Chris Yee, and for seven years it was the place a working DJ put a set so somebody besides the wedding guests could hear it. Comscore at one point called it the most trafficked DJ social network in the united states. My relationship to that world only went one way. I downloaded other people's mixes and never uploaded my own.

The thing that made mixcrate work is the same thing that killed it. Every mix on the site was built out of tracks the uploader did not own and could not license, because a two-hour set stitched from forty records is not something anyone can clear. That is true of every mixtape ever made. It was fine as long as nobody with a legal department was looking.

I found sites like this from turkey the way I found most american music services, which is to say from the outside, through a download rather than an account. Mixcrate never had a turkish moment the way the messengers and the big social networks did. It was a scene product for a scene I was not in, and the scene was mostly american.

~ the record ~

~ how it worked ~

You uploaded a mix as one long audio file, tagged it by genre, and people followed you and streamed it. Club promoters and radio stations used it to find talent. It sat on the same shelf as soundcloud, and for DJ mixes specifically it was often the better of the two, because soundcloud's content filters would flag a long set full of other people's records and pull it down. Mixcrate just let it sit there.

~ the day it died ~

On october 20 2016 the site posted a short notice and went dark. It said mixcrate had received a letter from a respected entity in the record industry, that it did not believe it was breaking any law, but that it did not have the means to keep operating under the current conditions. That is the whole story of the DJ-mix internet in one paragraph. The mixes are not illegal to make, only impossible to license, so the sites that host them live until somebody sends a letter.

~ what got buried with it ~

When mixcrate went down it took years of uploaded sets with it, most of which existed nowhere else. A DJ mix is a performance, not a file people keep backups of, and the ones that only lived on mixcrate are simply gone. Soundcloud absorbed some of the audience and later sites picked up the rest, but the specific archive of one small platform's regional DJ culture did not survive the shutdown.

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