At the start of this year, Doechii’s Alligator Bites Never Heal won the Grammy for Best Rap Album of 2024. Later in 2025, Jim Legxacy’s Black British Music was released to universal acclaim, and PinkPantheress’ Fancy That was nominated for the 2025 Grammy’s Best Dance/Pop Album. All are great albums, right? Well, strictly speaking, they aren’t – they’re mixtapes. 

Add Jianbo’s heartfelt ode to his late childhood friend, Everything for the Family, JayaHadADream’s indictment of intersectional prejudice in modern Britain, Happiness from Agony, and Ceebo’s Gen Z rap manifesto, Blair Babies, to the mix and a picture begins to form: in 2025, mixtapes have gotten more polished than ever. This is a far cry from the rough and ready mixtapes of years gone by. So, where has this recent “mixtapification” come from? Why is everything a mixtape now?

Once upon a time, mixtapes were actual tapes: compact cassettes made of rewritable magnetic tape. These were quickly adopted by hip hop’s Bronx forefathers in the early 70s, who used them to distribute live recordings of some of the culture’s first DJ mixes, giving rise to the name mixtape. Back then, the difference between a mixtape and an album was abundantly clear: the sound quality of a live recording could never compete with that of a studio LP.

Over time, the distinction between mixtapes and albums became increasingly blurred. Through the 90s and 00s – and the shift from physical to digital media – mixtapes moved away from their cassette origins and came to represent a looser, more experimental collection of tracks. During this era, Texas’s DJ Screw used mixtapes to bypass copyright restrictions and pioneer his signature chopped ‘n’ screwed style, reworking other artists’ songs into woozy, slowed-down remixes. Meanwhile, Lil Wayne launched his legendary mixtape run in the early 00s, often rapping over existing beats to create some of his most recognisable hits.

Eventually, a kind of singularity was reached with Drake’s 2015 release If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, which was the first mixtape to receive a Grammy nomination. Spiritually rooted in the online DatPiff-era mixtape culture – where artists dropped free, often unofficial projects directly to fans, bypassing traditional release structures – it shared that same sense of spontaneity and directness, despite being backed by a major label and composed entirely of original material. In reality, the project functioned as a full studio album, but Drake called it a mixtape partly to fulfil his contract with Cash Money without handing over what he considered a major “album” release (making it an album in all but name). To quote Drizzy himself: mixtapes really started from the bottom, now they’re here.

Today, as music consumption is centralised on platforms like Spotify – which notably doesn’t recognise ‘mixtape’ as a formal release format – those earlier definitions no longer apply. “Mixtapes used to be when people would get on songs that don’t belong to them, you’re selling something you don’t quite have the copyright to,” says 23-year-old Lambeth rapper Ceebo, who released his second mixtape, Blair Babies, earlier this month. “Streaming stopped all of that. If you do that today, your song is coming down within 24 hours. The original idea of a mixtape no longer exists in the streaming era.” Which begs the question: if mixtapes, as we once knew them, are dead – why do artists still insist on calling their projects that?

For smaller, independent artists, the mixtape label appears to exist as a quiet acknowledgement that, while their music now sits alongside high-budget major label releases on streaming platforms, their projects were made with a fraction of the resources. “This is a mixtape, not an album. If them folks gave me album budget I PROMISE [sic] I wouldn’t be rapping about how I want to pack myself,” Ceebo joked on his Instagram story following the release of Blair Babies this week. Given the (increasingly) abysmal royalties paid out by streaming platforms, Ceebo certainly isn’t making much revenue from streams alone. For artists navigating limited budgets and constant creative turnover, the mixtape becomes a practical solution, like a looser frame for serious work.

There can be an expectation attached to a ‘debut studio album’, so calling something a mixtape can alleviate that pressure for the artist

While accessible production software has helped democratise music-making, it doesn’t guarantee that independent artists have the time or financial support to refine their work. Music trends now move quickly these days, but albums are still expected to feel timeless, and it’s not hard to see how this pressure can produce some anxiety for artists. As Twelfth House publicist Tom Ohene-Yeboah puts it: “There can be an expectation attached to a ‘debut studio album’, so calling something a mixtape can alleviate that pressure for the artist.”

Camberwell rapper Jianbo sees mixtapes as a vital space for experimentation, especially for emerging artists. “Everything for the Family is a collection of rap songs that took as much effort as an album, but I just felt like it was too early in my story to release my debut album,” he tells Dazed. “It’s probably better to start with mixtapes so that we can get round to album time further down the line. I guess it also removes some of the pressure in what is already a stressful enough game!” JayaHadADream agrees: “I see Happiness From Agony as a mixtape because it’s experimental and a pure expression of creative freedom. I took risks, played around, and let the music guide me – that’s what makes it a mixtape rather than an album for me.” 

Creative freedom seems to be a key motivator behind mixtape releases from signed artists like Doechii and PinkPantheress, too. “Bluntly, I called [Alligator Bites Never Heal] a mixtape because no one [at the label] was paying attention to it,” Doechii told Dissect Podcast last year. “They were like, ‘Go and release your little mixtape!’ [...] I don’t mind if people call it an album now.” Aligning with previous comments made by Charli xcx about her experimental 2017 mixtape Number 1 Angel, Doechii positions the mixtape label as a way to take risks while still within the confines of a record deal – where calling something an album might invite pressure to follow trends, chase chart placements, and recoup label spending. It’s a strange dichotomy: smaller artists feel limited by a lack of resources, while more established ones feel constrained by the expectations that come with them.

Regardless, at the most basic level, each of these artists acknowledges that the distinction between a mixtape and an album is essentially arbitrary – it’s simply about how they want others to perceive their work. But, on a deeper level, the recent mixtapification trend strikes at the heart of music-making in 2025. If both mainstream and underground artists alike are feeling pressured to perform in the fast-paced streaming era, then the ability to take risks and experiment emerges as an increasingly rare and valuable commodity. Ultimately, over the last 50 years, mixtapes have always reflected what artists want to get out of them – and today, it seems that artists are craving freedom above all else.