Now this seems ingenious. Rebecca Black (yes, that Rebecca Black) has regularly released her Spotify playlists to her not-inconsiderable fanbase; this week, she’s actually put together a video in which she features some of her faves.

The complete playlist, if you’re a Spotify user, is here.

This exercise sounds familiar:

Lots of songs have numbers in their titles: from “5-4-3-2-1” to “99 Luftballons.” But what makes a great “number song”? Music journalist and self-appointed rock numerologist David Klein has spent years researching this very question for his new book If 6 was 9.

It’s a perfectly reasonable list. You may, or may not, want to compare it to the two compilations I’ve already done.

The Lost Ogle, an obscure local social blog in Oklahoma City with approximately 376,000 times as many readers as this place, has put up some ideas for The Ultimate Neil Diamond Mixtape. We of course approve, because (1) we’re Neil Diamond fans of long standing and (2) they didn’t mention “Sweet Caroline.”

That said, we put up a Diamond mix of our own about eight years ago, and we even put “Sweet Caroline” on it, for reasons perhaps best left buried.

This film, I’m hoping, might finally be going into production after several years in limbo:

Mixtape is a music-driven coming of age comedy about a 12-year-old girl, raised by her aunt, who never knew her mother. Finding a mixtape that once belonged to her mom, she accidentally destroys it. Since the music on the tape is the only link she has to her deceased parents, the girl sets out to track down each of the obscure songs listed on the tape’s case, finding out something about her parents, or herself, along the way. In 2009 the script won the American Zoetrope screenwriting contest and it appeared on the Black List that same year.

The “Black List” is a film-industry recognition of the best unproduced scripts, generally intended to impel someone actually to produce them. IMDb lists the film as “pre-production” as of the first of September, which may or may not mean anything.

I can’t even argue with this:

The art — and make no mistake about it, it is an art — of making a mixtape is one lost on a generation that only has to drag and drop to complete a mix. There’s no love or passion involved in moving digital songs from one folder to another. Those “mixes” are just playlists held prison inside a device. There’s no blood, sweat and tears involved in making them.

And furthermore:

For the beauty of the mix tape alone, I’d love to see the cassette make a comeback, for everyone to have a chance to learn the art of the mix. I know, they can easily do that on a computer. But there’s something about the finished product, the feel of the cassette in your hand, the hand-written track list, that fine string of tape you can pull out of the cassette in a fit of emotion when the relationship sours and your boyfriend returns the tape with all your other stuff, that makes this artifact of another era so much more than just a playlist.

Preach it, Sister Christian.

This is a task one takes very seriously indeed:

Dear Husband took it upon himself to create the perfect 70s playlist. He worked on this bad boy for weeks, possibly months. All the music had to be from 1974 or earlier and was a perfect mixture of soul, funk, rock and very early punk.

He had 4 hours of music plus an alternate list for the late night guests.

And he was wise enough to kick it off with the party-starter of the age: Carl Douglas’ immortal “Kung Fu Fighting.”

My introduction to 8tracks.com came from, of all people, Rebecca Black. Then again, the young lady who turned “Friday” into an earworm has been known to surprise people. (See, for instance, her cover of Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball.”)

RB’s ten-track November ’13 mix opens with Heavy English’s debut single “21 Flights” and continues with “Come a Little Closer” from Cage the Elephant’s Melophobia album. That should give you enough reason to check out the rest of it.

I did over 300 of these, some of which eventually were updated to CDs, which is why this site is here in the first place.

And yes, they were all something like this:

Weirdly, it now takes me longer to assemble an 80-minute CD than it did a 90-minute tape.

(Via Outside the Beltway.)

Delusional Thomas is to Mac Miller what Chris Gaines is to Garth Brooks: new ideas, same fingerprints. Miller — er, Thomas — has unleashed a new mix, produced by Larry Fisherman (also Miller), with special appearances by Miller as Miller and by the wonderfully-named Earl Sweatshirt.

Give it a listen at Potholes In My Blog.

Bon Appétit comes up with 25 songs that ought to fit into your diet somewhere. How many of these selections match up with my Fewer Songs About Buildings and Food compilation? Three.