I've recently watch Mixed by erry, a very nice movie about Enrico Frattasio, an italian DJ that built almost an industry of pyrated mixtapes in the early 90s. So I remember that in Spain, although there were no such example, there were indeed some mixes in those days. Two expert spanish DJs (Tony Peret & Mike platinas, which in english would be 'Mike cassette decks') started a series of professionally mixed mixtapes with the top songs then. It was called Max Mix and I have the 6th gen of it: Max Mix 6. It came with 3 cassettes: the first one contained the mix, and the rest, all the songs used for that. The cassette itself has a decent quality, not type 0 at all. Not an UX-Pro, of course, but the recording quality is very nice and it's a chrome tape recorded as type I (120us). Taking in mind that this were done in 1988 probably without the help of any computer (or maybe using a primitive one), it's quite impressive mix. Although you probably won't understand a few words in spanish, it's definitely in humorous way. After it, in Spain a new cathegory appeared and lots of sucessors came to market (but I only have two of them). I don't know if this happened also in other countries, so feedback is welcomed. But what's sure is that the original one (here) was this one, the first version. I was too young when it appeared for first so I could just buy the 6th version. I've captured it in my Yamaha KX930 easily. No Dolby (thanks) and I upload here for you. You can find it in the attached files below. So, what do you think? Was there something similar in your country?
I think our FBI was on counterfeiters like fleas on a dog. The only mix tapes we had were from K-Tel and Ronco, professional companies kicking out tons of music. Every once in awhile they got you by having cover bands play the music on some of the releases, I'm sure the royalites were much less. Cool find, I was watching a YouTube Video on an old file-sharing website (you had to be invited) and they had a ton of new band releases and stuff like your tape. The tape label is really nice, I would guess this was offset-printed, I'm really wondering how they did the four-color J-card, too early for a computer printer and offset would have been really expensive. I don't remember when color copies became cheap or widespread but I think it was after this.
No, don't misunderstand me, this is not a pyrate tape, this is a commercial tape, fully legal. It was announced on TV also if I'm not wrong. the J-card is offset printed, of course and even the cassette is a type II, so not a cheapo type zero.
