Fanlore:Featured Article Archives/2020: Week 47
A fanmix is a compilation of songs inspired by a fannish source, such as a fandom, a character, or a ship.
Fanmixes can also accompany a fanwork, as when a fic writer puts up a soundtrack alongside their story. Often fanmixes come with Photoshop cover art and/or creative titles. Some fanmix creators will specify that the fanmix should be played in order, in order to tell a story with the progression of songs; others will group together songs thematically, but without a particular order.
The name is a portmanteau of fannish + mixtape. In some fannish communities, the term fan soundtrack or FST is more commonly known. In the digital era, they are also referred to simply as playlists.
In the past, some fanmixes have been shared on tape, such as the soundtrack tape that came with the Miami Vice zine Crockett-Dial #6 (1996). They moved online with the advent of the internet, and are now typically created on websites that offer a wide selection of music that can be curated into playlists, such as Spotify, 8tracks (a major site of fanmix creation since its launch in 2008) and YouTube, and shared on social platforms like LiveJournal and Tumblr. An advantage of this is that fanmix creators can choose from a wider variety of songs without needing to own them, but they are also more easily lost if the platform goes down (such as with the increased instability and eventual closure of 8tracks).