So I’ve been thinking.
These mix CD exchanges I’ve been running the past few years have proven popular and a lot of fun, and I’m interested in having another. But the truth is they’re also been getting progressively more difficult to handle for some of us. I’ve had a number of suggestions tossed my way, including limits on the number of participants, impositions of set themes, and moratoriums on specific artists or songs. I’m not prepared to declare any music off-limits just yet — even if we were getting an awful lot of They Might Be Giants tunes for awhile there — and while seeing what sort of mixes might develop from a shared theme might be interesting, a lot of the fun in these exchanges has come from letting everyone discover his or her own unique themese (or lack thereof) in the mixing process.
So that would seem to leave number of participants. More than anything else, I think this has come to be the problem factor. There were about five of us in my first mix exchange. There were closer to fifteen in my last. As more people have expressed interest in playing along, I’ve had to rely increasingly on the hope that yet others will (at least temporarily) drop out. Even then, keeping the number of copies I ask from people down to ten has proven tough. And even ten, I’ve come to realize, might be asking a lot.
It’s not so much the cost or time involved in copying the CDs, or the postage involved in getting them to and from me. If anything, I think people are becoming overwhelmed at the other end: ten (and often more) CDs is a lot to listen to. It’s not surprising the comments on the mixes have sometimes been sparse. There’s a lot of great music, but dear god, there’s a lot of great music. I can certainly understand how some might feel like maybe it’s too much all at once.
So I’m looking for options. If you’re interested in participating, what would you prefer:
- a. first-come, first-served: no more than 5 people in the exchange all together;
- b. random distribution: everybody in, but with smaller concurrent exchanges of about 5 people each; or
- c. just the way things are: the more music the merrier!
There may also be options I’m not considering. Let me know if you can think of any.
I am interested in having another exchange and foisting my musical tastes on others, but some of the systems kinks probably need to be worked out first.
I think I need to have this from Neil Gaiman pasted to the inside of my brain:
It’s not a science. It’s an art and a sometimes it’s a craft. The most important thing (and I know I say this a lot but it’s true, or at least it’s true for me) is finishing things, because that’s when you find out if they worked or not. The rest of the time it’s just hoping. And if you stop writing when a promising beginning runs out of steam, maybe you need something more in the planning stages. Or maybe you just need to soldier madly onward and see what Chance and Necessity (the mother, it must be remembered, of invention) provide.
Well, that and Terry Gilliam’s assertion that “You can’t be silly if you have self-doubt.”