How this happened
So here's how this happened.
A while back, I found a shoebox full of mixtapes I'd burned onto CDs in the late 90s and early 2000s... and look, if you're under 30, a “burned CD” is what your parents made before playlists, on a beige plastic box called a “CD-R,” with a Sharpie title like “ROAD TRIP 2001 (FINAL)(REAL FINAL).” Putting one in felt like archaeology. There I was, suddenly back in a manual-transmission Jeep Wrangler with questionable brakes, driving to a job I don't have anymore, listening to a sequence of songs I had agonized over for an entire weekend. Because before the mixtape went in, the radio was on... 92.3 K-Rock for the alternative and grunge I was living on at the time, 104.3 when I was just starting to figure out that classic rock was, in fact, pretty great. The mixtape was what you made from the radio. It was the curated version. The director's cut.
A few of them I'd made for a girl I had a crush on at Rutgers... and there's something about driving across that campus with a mixtape playing that just fit. Which, let me tell you, was a production. You picked the songs. You ordered the songs. You re-ordered the songs because track three didn't flow into track four. You designed a cover. You handed it over with the appropriate amount of fake-casual “oh, I just threw this together.” It took effort... real effort! And that was the entire point. The effort was the gift.
From Spotify Wrapped to a record you can hold
Then I went back to my Spotify Wrapped and felt... I don't know. Something was missing. Wrapped is great. It's fun, it's shareable, it tells me I listened to Fleetwood Mac more than I'd like to admit. But it's a screenshot. It disappears. I wanted to actually hold the year. Put it on a shelf. Hand it to my kids in thirty years and go, “this is what your dad was into, please be kind.”
Making the first one
So I tried to print the screenshot. Then I thought, why am I printing a screenshot? I should put it on a record, like I used to put music on CDs back in the day. I put my Wrapped songs on Side A, and I put my wife's Wrapped on Side B. She had already texted her Wrapped screenshot to me unprompted, so this wonderful creation basically gift-wrapped itself. Watching her reaction when she opened the package was the moment I realized other people might want this too.
A custom vinyl mixtape, made from your music
That's the whole thing. You bring the music that means something to you... your Wrapped, your wedding song, the playlist that got you through a brutal year, the mix you've been meaning to make your dad forever... and we cut it onto a real, playable custom vinyl record. Lathe-cut, one at a time, made to order, with whatever artwork you want on it. It is, by any reasonable metric, a deeply impractical way to listen to music. That's also the point.
A custom vinyl mixtape, made from the music that actually matters to you. Thanks for being here.
-Harsh, Vinyl Mixtape Shop Founder