My attention was drawn to this website about a week ago. The “iPod” in the title makes a reference to the fact that the heyday of the mashup has passed. While the genre has not disappeared - in fact, it is now fully entrenched in our culture - it was au courant in the early 2000s, the age of the iPod. The website is also marked with the telling phrase, “2007 forever.”
Still, this site seemed SO cool to me! There are 20 tracks on the left, and you can drag and drop any of them onto one of the 23 tracks on the right, and an on-the-spot mashup is made! I started thinking about how complicated this site must have been to put together. Were all of the songs altered so that they were at the same tempo? What about keys? The total number of combinations between 20 and 23 songs (assuming only two songs are being layered at one time) is 460, so the creator of this site had to allow for all of these possibilities!
It became clear when I started experimenting with the site that things were a bit more limited that I originally thought. When I clicked on “Move Bitch” by Ludacris, for example, only eight tracks on the other side of the screen became highlighted – it can’t be combined with anything. I can mash “Move Bitch” with “All Star” by Smashmouth, but not with “Stacy’s Mom” by Fountains of Wayne. I counted the actual mashing possibilities, and there are 151 potential mashups that could result from the site. Still impressive, but not quite what I originally thought.
This interview with The Ringer informs us that the mastermind behind the site is Race Archibold, a 23-year-old data analyst. He reveals in the interview that we users who select the tracks to mash, are actually not making any decisions: “They’re all pre-mixed.” Aha! This makes the site simultaneously less and more impressive than I first thought it was. The drag-and-drop interface, while awesome, is actually not necessary. Archibold could have just provided us with a list of 151 mashups that he created. But, (a) would that website have spread as virally? And, (b) he created 151 mashups! That in itself is pretty impressive!
In conclusion, this website is most useful for allowing people to see exactly what sorts of things combine well. Users can look at a track like “Move Bitch,” and investigate the eight mashups that Archibold made with it, and draw certain conclusions from those choices.The site is not a mashup generator, but a mashup demonstration. And in that regard, it is pretty great.