The art of the mixtape isn’t lost thanks to Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett

Spotify has highlighted a recent campaign by Aussie songwriter Courtney Barnett and her American counterpart Kurt Vile as part of their latestcase study.

The ingeniousIntercontinental Mixtape Exchange programwas used as part of the promotion of the pair’s album togetherLotta Sea Lice,and invited listeners to make a new musical friend by submitting a playlist, sending it into the world as a digital postcard and immediately receiving a playlist postcard in exchange.

“We were trying to find a way to take the themes of some of the lyrical content of the record,” says Naomi Scott, director of creative development at Beggar’s Group, pointing to that song in particular.

“We built it in a way that it attempts to connect you to a person who is in a different part of the world.”

The program was designed to notice where the user is located when sending the mixtape, and to match them with someone in a different part of the world.

“It was very much an exercise in trying to reach across different continents,” explains Scott, “rather than simply a random matching of people.”

Adam Berman, a designer and developer who works at Beggar’s Group, says there were “500 or 600” playlists made in the first day, and now more than a thousand have been created and sent, many of them including Vile and Barnett songs.

“The best result of the project was that we got responses from places all over the world that we didn’t even think Kurt and Courtney had fans in, like Malaysia or Japan, places in Africa and Europe,” he says. “It really became an international experience. Just because of the internet, word got out, and we had a bunch of different people who used it.”

“Sharing Spotify playlists is arguably the new sharing mixtapes,” Scott added.