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" From the days of painstakingly recorded cassettes, to home-burnt CDs, and now Spotify playlists, the mixtape - thankfully - lives on. The latest version comes courtesy of a partnership between Spotify and Internet Explorer - web tool MixShape.  Its music analytics software and quirky visuals allow you to morph your playlists into one sizzling soundtrack - shuffling the songs, knocking out moodkillers and offering alternatives depending on your options. Also on board is DJ, producer, Mo&amp;#039; Wax founder and UNKLE star James Lavelle and, after having a play with the software, Digital Spy had a chat with James about why he&amp;#039;s on board. On his involvement &amp;quot;I was asked to compile playlists for the project. I&amp;#039;ve been given four categories - work, romance, exercise and party. I wanted something that was eclectic, hopefully there were elements of discovery, things that were going to be classic and appeal to a wide spectrum people but obviously still coming from my perspective.&amp;quot; On the perfect DJ set &amp;quot;A classic DJ set would be a 12 hour set where you go from underground electronic music to disco classics. There&amp;#039;s nothing better in a club when suddenly you hear Stevie Wonder in the middle of a techno set. If you get it right it&amp;#039;s amazing what you can do with music.&amp;quot; Balancing things for casuals and hardcore &amp;quot;I hope that somebody who&amp;#039;s actually more opinionated about stuff will get it and go, wow - actually I can join the dots here quite well. Equally I wanted it to appeal to people who aren&amp;#039;t aware or don&amp;#039;t care about my history.&amp;quot;      The difference between vinyl and streaming &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m used to having my record collection and seeing the covers and reacting to how records are. As time&amp;#039;s gone by we&amp;#039;re getting less and less like that. The more help you get from technology to remind you of records that you might not remember - even the artist&amp;#039;s name or the title of the song - the better.&amp;quot; Does he still make compilations with his records? &amp;quot;I have a very large record collection, and it&amp;#039;s been in storage for two years. I actually only got it out two weeks ago - it&amp;#039;s a lot to wade through! Once you get into the compilation side of things with this it&amp;#039;s like getting back into your record collection. It&amp;#039;s very fun.&amp;quot; On keeping that fun as things go digital &amp;quot;The thing I&amp;#039;ve always found difficult as a DJ when you get digital files is you end up with endless information - but you don&amp;#039;t have reference points to look out. If you don&amp;#039;t remember a certain thing it&amp;#039;s very difficult to find it. With this, I&amp;#039;ve found the association with other artists really useful. It&amp;#039;s probably the best format to give you relevant and interesting comparative information and bands. You end up in this endless world of music.&amp;quot; Do artists get a fair deal from Spotify? &amp;quot;The business will change and adapt and right now we are in a period of no-man&amp;#039;s land. People always go on about this but the music industry in many ways right now for the artists is a better place than it was 50 years ago and 30 years ago. The argument is always going to be the corporate side and how it pushes against the independent side. Right now it&amp;#039;s great if you&amp;#039;re Eminem or Rihanna or &amp;#039;Gangnam Style&amp;#039; or whatever because you can make a massive amount of revenue from those streams.   &amp;quot;What is interesting with Spotify, which is probably the best musical platform out there in terms of listening to music - just the experience of being able to listen to a record collection - is that when you look at Sweden where 70-80% of all music is listened to via Spotify. It&amp;#039;s going to be interesting to see what happens. I hope it will become a more productive business model for the artists. I don&amp;#039;t have the answers, otherwise I wouldn&amp;#039;t be sitting here right now!&amp;quot; On being involved in a corporate venture and accusations of selling out &amp;quot;My view is that if I&amp;#039;m going to use something on a daily basis and it has a positive effect on what I do, how can I not justify the fact that I&amp;#039;m working on it? If I&amp;#039;m suddenly here talking about Esso, it&amp;#039;s a very different point. I don&amp;#039;t think it&amp;#039;s a vacuous product. &amp;quot;I have more of a problem sitting here talking about Gucci than I would be about Spotify. It&amp;#039;s part of my day-to-day life. There&amp;#039;s so much music out there and so much music that gets lost, that the more platforms there are for people to discover music the better. The more you discover, the more you find. &amp;quot;While the record stores are declining, I find it more interesting having that Spotify experience than going to a huge corporate dinosaur record shop. It&amp;#039;s about embracing all of it. It&amp;#039;s very important to have tangible products, it&amp;#039;s very important to have a record store, it&amp;#039;s very important to have a boutique record store, but this is a great platform for music to be consumed.&amp;quot; MixShape is freely available online now. James Lavelle judges a month-long competition to find the best MixShape held across Internet Explorer&amp;#039;s Facebook and Twitter pages. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/tech/interviews/a468513/james-lavelle-interview-i-love-hearing-stevie-wonder-in-a-techno-set/>