YouTube channel HipHopMadness returns with a new video looking at “The Mixtape: How 50 Cent Changed It & Lil Wayne Solidified It.”
Check out the video, and their desceiption of the video, below:
From DJ’s selling cassettes in barbershops to young artists now digitally uploading their projects onto Spotify, The definition of a “mixtape” in hip-hop is fluid and has dramatically shifted over the decades. Not to mention household names like Drake, Chance The Rapper, Young Thug and Future flooding the market with “commercial mixtapes” and significantly blurring the line between mixtape and album.
From the late 2000s to the mid-2010s before the dawn of the Soundcloud era, the mixtape became an almost mandatory path for any young starving MC. From Mac Miller’s “K.I.D.S.” to Wiz Khalifa’s “K & OJ”, the peak of The Blog Era meant that a classic mixtape could catapult you from rags to riches with no label involvement.
But the defining moment of mixtapes happened in the early 2000’s, and you can draw a distinct line in the sand to separate the 2 main chapters of mixtape history- pre and post 50 Cent.
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