Mixtapes
A social music game where non-musicians mash up real songs together, in the browser. Built and shipped in code in eight days, October 2026.
What it is
Music tools are built for producers, and the world now listens through memes, phones and 15-second clips. Mixtapes is the social layer for everyone else: a browser room where people pick stems from real songs, roll the dice for odd-couple collisions ("Bill Hicks VS Zeppelin"), tell an AI engineer what they want in plain English and share the result as a link. The AI moves sounds; it never makes one. Every lane is a real recording by a real artist.
The alternative to AI music
AI music is a model trained on the world's catalogs, making sound nobody played. Mixtapes uses the multitrack files of the catalog itself, the way the underground has for decades, except licensed. It respects the original recording instead of cannibalizing it. In May 2026 Spotify and Universal signed the commercial model: opt-in catalog, artists sharing the revenue, a paid consumer tier. They applied it to a model. Mixtapes applies it to the files.
How it was built
Eight days, one person, in code: Claude Code, Tone.js, Vercel and Cloudflare R2 for the full-length stereo stems. Full songs stream from R2, the engineer executes multi-step requests ("drop the guitar, put a 70s vocal on top, slow it to 92"), the booth sings the verse on the bar you pick, and every room is a link. The brand is the Mixtapes.IO identity from 2018, the cassette art and the zebra reel, brought forward. Design, code, sound and the film are mine.
Where it stands
Applied to a16z Speedrun in October 2026 with this demo, the film and the deck. The demo runs on archived multitracks; a public launch runs on cleared material (open MIDI, my own recordings, user uploads, one opt-in catalog pilot) while the label path is worked with John Bolton, who ran global music licensing at TikTok.