Turnbull Mixtape 10: I'm (never) getting too old for this Sh*aring
The annual Turnbull Mixtape turns ten! We're looking back over a decades' worth of Creative Commons music to compile a 'best of' with all the greatest hits.
Ten years of sharing Creative Commons mixtapes
Well, well, well, it has been ten years of Creative Commons Mixtapes and in the famous, slightly remixed words of Roger Murtaugh; We’re (never) getting too old for this Sh*aring!
After all, Danny Glover was only 41 when he alluded to his slowing down (50 in the movie), and seeing as I am also now at the ripe old age of 41 it seemed appropriate enough! However, as we now know there were three more movie outings for Murtaugh and even talk of a Lethal Weapon finale starting production this year.
Buddy cop movies aside, creating ten Creative Commons mixtapes definitely is a cause for celebration, and what better way to celebrate than to look back and see what ten years of stirring the creative commons pot have achieved.
I also thought the age-old classic of releasing a ‘Best of’ album mid-career was a solid option, and not just because I’m busy and it seemed like less work (it really wasn’t).
Take a seat, queue appropriate CC musical montage, and stay tuned as we boldly go where we have most definitely been before and take a look behind the curtain at mixtapes past.
Creating the Creative Commons Mixtape, a short(ish) history
Rewinding way back to 2012, when the world was a very different place, we began noticing that more Creative Commons music was coming into our collections. I did notice when I pulled this data together that in fact our collecting peaked in 2011 and has steadily been declining since 2015.
This could be misleading however as we were working with backlogs around 2011, and once we caught up (if that is ever possible!) it would have looked like fewer items were coming in.
We also started adding CC license info into the catalogue records around 2011 so this may have also led to a bit of a spike.
Creative Commons licenses allowed us to make this music fully accessible to a wider audience by breaking down the reading (listening) room walls and streaming music online.
We wanted to find a way to promote our CC music collection that enabled more openness and sharing as intended by the licences, and the Turnbull Mixtape was born!
The idea was to put together a mixtape of tracks archived over the past year that people could listen to, download and share. This would be accompanied by a blog post with some interesting facts about Creative Commons and our digital music collecting in general.
The Turnbull Mixtape
Our first mixtape, aptly named The Turnbull Mixtape was put together by a handful of library staff and received an encouraging response.
We also got some important feedback from musicians and listeners, like updating the track metadata so it would appear as an album in digital players (not as much of an issue these days) and providing an mp3 version as well as the lossless version that we originally provided, being the purists that we are!
For The Turnbull Mixtape mixes again we pushed the tracks out to a wider selection panel in the Library while also giving staff a creative license to wax poetically about the music they chose.
The comments quickly became an integral part of the mixtape and seemed to take on a life of their own, getting bigger and more obscure each year.
It’s quite an eclectic group of music to interact with and I think this came through in the comments.
Turnbull 3: Rise of the mixtape kept the same format but we also branched out and began uploading the tracks to SoundCloud. This gave us the benefit of seeing how popular the tracks were and provided an alternative listening platform that helped extend the mixtape to a wider audience.
The following three mixtapes basically kept the same format. Dad jokes and witty titles also seemed to be par for the course…
Creative Commons changes
After 6 months in a leaky boat, it was time to dry out and take stock. We thought it would be a good idea to mix things up and try and get the public more involved in the selection process.
Eventually, we landed on the idea of gamifying the mixtape by creating a long list of tracks at the start of May that people could listen to, and effectively vote on through said listens.
Near the end of May, we tallied up the stats and selected the top 10 to go into the playlist for Turnbull Mixtape 7: one time at Bandcamp.
As the title suggests this also saw us get our head out of the soundcloud(s) and on the bus to Bandcamp, where the full collection of mixtapes can now be found.
We decided to move to Bandcamp for a variety of reasons, but mainly because there was more upload space, analytics, and at the time, a stronger independent community of musicians and fans to potentially engage with. SoundCloud was also starting to head the way of Myspace but seems to have since recovered and is still alive and kicking.
One time at Bandcamp proved to be a successful experiment and was, still is, our most popular mixtape by a country music mile. (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t our most-read mixtape blog, however).
Then, 2020 flipped the script and introduced us to the world of Covid and Lockdowns. With many staff working from home we lent into the theme of Desert Island Discs for the digital world.
Staff from throughout the library were invited to think about what they would take on their device should they be cast away to a desert island, aka social isolation in Aotearoa.
Each contributor selected their favourite ‘relaxing’ track from our Creative Commons collections, their favourite podcast, and one optional app they couldn’t do without. This resulted in Turnbull mixtape 8: Desert island digitals.
Finally, I did say short(ish) … we find ourselves at Turnbull Mixtape 9: Revolution no. 9 no. 9 no. 9 a mixtape dedicated to the art of remixing.
The brief was simple; choose a track that covers, remixes, samples, or mashes up another creative work and have fun with it!
Was it worth it?
It was for the Pet Shop Boys in 1990, but what have we gained from a decade of promoting our Creative Commons music collection??
The graph below shows how many times the collections in the National Library's catalogue collection discovery page get accessed per month from April 2019 to March 2022. While it is a broad dataset including a few other collections, there are noticeable spikes in May of each year until 2021.
Interestingly if you compare the graph pulled from Bandcamp which shows plays per month over the same period there are also significant peaks in May 2019 and 2021 and a gentle climb in May 2020.
We can probably infer these peaks relate to the Creative Commons Music collection being accessed more frequently during music month in response to the mixtape and blog. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence of increasing interactions over time though which is something we would have liked to have seen.
There are of course other pathways to access CC music, namely the Library’s website but this data gives a glimpse into how promoting the collection can boost interaction. The other missing link is the number of times the actual mixtape was downloaded from either the blog or Bandcamp, which of course is part of what we are trying to encourage!
Blog logs, logs of blogs
We also pulled some google analytics data from the Creative Commons Blogs. The main metric is the number of page views per blog, and as you can see from the graph above there were no clear patterns! The Turnbull Mixtape mixes again has clearly been the most read. I’m not entirely sure why this is the case, but perhaps moving the mixtape onto multiple platforms from 2014 while increasing the overall reach of the mixtape, may have led to fewer page views on the National Library blog in the following years? There was no mixtape in 2015 so this mini-break could have led to lower views in 2016, but this seems unlikely as 2016 to 2018 remained consistent. It looks like the change in format in 2019 was successful in drawing more readership with almost double the views, which is great as it took twice as much work to put together!
Turnbull Mixtape 8: Desert Island Digitals has the highest average time (5.77 minutes) spent on the page. It is one of the longer blogs and wasn’t limited to just music, but also included podcasts and apps. One could also argue that people potentially had more online time available in 2020 as we were in the middle of our first country-wide lockdown!
As expected, the page views per day from May 2016 show a similar repeating pattern as the interaction with the Creative Commons collection in Primo, with noticeable peaks each May. Turnbull Mixtape 7: One time at Bandcamp in 2019 had a lower peak but the page view cluster throughout April to June was higher due to the month-long engagement with the ‘competition’ and a two-part blog.
No postcode envy
By looking at some of the data from The Turnbull Mixtape mixes again we can see the locations people were visiting the blog from.
While the top locations are Auckland and Wellington as one would expect, there are also quite a few visits from overseas with both Helsinki and Munich featuring in the top ten. These two countries don’t tend to rank this highly in visits to the National Library Blog which is quite interesting in itself.
It doesn’t surprise me too much that Munich features as there is a market for NZ music in Munich and Berlin, with quite a large ex-pat community of Kiwi musicians living and performing there... perhaps there is a 'work-related' trip to Europe on the cards in the future! I must confess I had to google where Talence was! FYI it is a commune in the Gironde department, administrative region of Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France.
Looking at the geodata from the blog put some questions in my mind that definitely needed some answers, and I was interested in what locations the CC music in our collections were predominantly coming from (bearing in mind they are all connected to New Zealand in some way).
Once again, NZ had the largest proportion, California, Melbourne and London also make sense as these are traditional hotspots for music production. Berlin also made the top ten which rings true for the reasons I have already mentioned (work trip..). I wonder if we burrowed down to the French connection whether we would find ourselves in Talence again?
Turnbull Mixtape 10: I'm (never) getting too old for this Sh*aring.
We’ve finally reached the crescendo where we can announce the top ten tracks of the decade!
There are 2 ways (probably more) we could have done this. The first would be to rank the listens on Bandcamp and choose the top 10 most listened to tracks, but because this would have basically been a re-release of Turnbull Mixtape 7: one time at Bandcamp we went with the B side.
This was essentially to choose the most popular track from each year (2 from 2019 for good measure) and here is where we landed.
Listen, download and share alike, it has been an absolute privilege putting these mixtapes together over the last 10 years!
Special thanks to all those who have had a hand in pulling the mixtapes together over the last decade and to Jay, Rich, and Sam for pulling out the data for me to remix 😉 And of course all the musicians who have created and shared their wonderful music!
Turnbull Mixtape 10: I'm (never) getting too old for this Sh*aring
Turnbull Mixtape 10 playlist
Eye for a telescope / Doteyes (2009), CC BY-NC 3.0 | Collection record
Single-digit high / Jet Jaguar (2013), CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 | Collection record
You are my mansion / Athuzela Brown (2013), CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 | Collection record
Airplane #1 / Womb (2015), CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 |
Collection recordMother / Womb — Live at the Newtown Bowls Club 7” (2016), CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 | Collection record
Last song on (Movement I) / Alphabethead (2004), CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 | Collection record
Spear storm / Gangari (2018), CC BY-NC 3.0 | Collection record
im disassembling my body in preparation for the floods / PMT (2018), CC BY-NC 3.0 | Collection record
Thaw / Rueben Derrick (2007), CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 | Collection record
Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No! (Enright House Remix) / The Mint Chicks (2010), CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 | Collection record
Optional extra-curricular activity
Want to do some of your own creating in the commons? You may have noticed that this year's mixtape doesn't have any cover art.
Why not have a go at creating the album cover? It could be original, using CC images, or other collection items, just make sure they are shareable!
Perhaps check out the albums that have contributed to the mixtape over the last decade with this Digital NZ story and get some inspiration.
Email your finished artwork (1400 x 1400 pixels minimum) to atl-online-acquisitions@dia.govt.nz with 'Mixtape Cover Art" in the title.