Master Your Craft: Is my project a Mixtape OR an Album?

By: Andile Nkosi 

So you have spent the past 3 months in the studio scripting and lacing vocals to the best beats you can find. You are happy with the outcome and your friends and producers call you the next biggest thing. You have 12 dope trax comprising of 6 original beats and 4 sampled beats and 2 beats from your favorite rap artist’s album. You already have a title in mind and are ready to drop before you pause and yourself, is my project a Mixtape or an Album?

Well, the line has become more and more blurry since the success of artists like DRAKE who is referred by many as the fist mixtape millionaire. I consulted a few sources and found out a few interesting facts to help you in your decision. 

IndependentMusicAdvise.com affirms that an album is made of all your own material (Rather than using beats and vocals you haven’t got permission to use) and you can make money from royalties when your tune is played on legal radio, television and other license paying media. On the other hand, with a mixtape, one can use other people’s beats and uncleared sampled vocals since any royalties emanating from the airplay of these goes to the original artists pockets. A mixtape, is thus seen as means to promote yourself as an artist and a brand more than anything else. A definite advantage to using instrumentals other people have already made big tunes with can help people warm to your music quicker as familiar backing tracks gets the crowds buy in much easier. Proverb uses this tactic in most of his live performances.

As such, albums are more expensive and time consuming to make however, the fruits, should the project be successful is much greater. A good album can attract revenue for years even after you the artist is long dead and gone. Besides, people generally take the idea of an album more seriously than a mixtape.

With the price of recording equipment getting cheaper, music software becoming widely available and more and more artists owning their own recording set up at home, the making of an album has become too easy. One sure fact is that perception is everything, and consumers tend to have respect for album as opposed to mixtape which are thought to be of poor quality and not worth spending on. Now, as for answering the question, is my project a Mixtape or an Album? I personally think South African artists refer to albums as mixtapes whenever they have no proper distribution channel available to them. Once distribution is sorted, they often change the tune to My Album. What do you think?

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