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World Mixtape is an experiment in exploring the world through its music.

Navigate a world map, choose any country, and travel through its decades — from the early 1900s to right now. Every track is locally produced popular music: made by people from that place (natives and diaspora), not imports. It's a way to hear how a country actually sounds, decade by decade.

And because music is a doorway, not a destination, each country is wrapped in context — photos, an outline map, key facts, its most important people, and an honest, plain-spoken history timeline. A song becomes a way in to a place.

What makes this specific is how the music is chosen. For each country and each decade, the collection blends two things:

  • Culturally significant local music — the songs that mattered where they were made.
  • Hand-picked artists from my own world-music library, because I've spent years falling in love with music from everywhere.

This isn't about digging up rare gems — that's a different, beautiful game. It's about familiarizing yourself with local popular culture: the music people there grew up on and made their own.

Popular music is created everywhere, and all of it deserves to be explored. This is for the curious — for anyone who wants to get a feel for places they may never go, to explore local culture and creative output, and maybe crack open a door into a country's history.

It's built to reward curiosity, and to center a simple idea: every culture is valuable and interesting.

It grows out of two projects we made at Hyperakt — The Refugee Project and On The Grid — both worldwide explorations built to help people understand context, history, and perspective. Both were made before the era of AI.

The interface owes a debt to Radiooooo (yes, five o's) — a wonderful map-based, decade-organized music library curated by DJs. World Mixtape borrows its structure but changes the lens and the goal: where Radiooooo is about discovering gems, this is about familiarizing yourself with local popular culture, layered with the story of each place so it doubles as a learning experience.