The LA Times has a nice history of the commercial "mix tape" (now on CD) and its role in promoting new hip-hop talent:

New York — On clear weekends here, a boisterous bazaar sets up along the sidewalks that bracket Broadway and Canal Street, and anyone in the market for a gold chain, a bootleg DVD or a Rolex of questionable pedigree can haggle up and down the block. One of the fixtures on this scene is a salesman — he identifies himself only as "J" (it's even on his business card) — who stacks underground rap CDs on a folding table, most priced at $10.

The CDs are called mix tapes, and while the name is defiantly old school in its cassette-era origins, they are the cutting edge of the moment as rap finds some of its future in its own past. A flagship symbol of that phenomenon is best-selling rapper 50 Cent, who this year spun his mix-tape success into major label platinum. J, a proud merchant, is well aware of all of this. "It all starts here," he said with a wave of his hand. "If it's new, it's right here."

....In the 1970s, mix tapes were the first recordings of the nascent hip-hop scene in this city, and back then they were often simply a document of a DJ's playlist at a nightclub on a Saturday night. "We made them and sold them at the clubs and through taxi drivers," hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa said. "There were no rap records yet, so this was the only way people could take the music with them."

....Much of the stir can be attributed to 50 Cent, the thuggish New York rhymer who was a staple of the mix tape scene for years before his major label breakthrough in February set sales records for a rapper's debut. More than that, established stars such as Snoop Dogg and P. Diddy in recent months have premiered new material through the mix tapes in a form of street-level test marketing and promotion, and Busta Rhymes has plans to follow suit. MTV, arguably the defining indicator of mainstream youth music, now posts reviews of the "mix tape of the week" on its Web site.

...."In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the mix tape had really become something, you had DJs like Kid Capri taking it to the next level," Morales said. "There were all these new cats, everything was fine and dandy, and then in the mid-1990s the RIAA started getting in the scene. By then you had all these Web sites and companies devoted to mix tapes, and the RIAA sees that and, boom, here come the bigwigs. After that, it was quiet for years."

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