A collaborative playlist chip is being passed around as the new version the largely obsolete mixtape. Intending to shake things up in the way people find out about music outside Spotify and the like, X-II (pronounced “twelve”) is a physical cassette-like device that, when touched by the user’s phone, allows them to visualise its content, add their own track and image and pass it to someone else. Each user is allowed one track only, to a total of 12 tracks per tape.

Connected to the iPhone app, each addition is recorded with the image and location of where it was added. It is also possible to keep track of its content and current locations after the user passed it on.

By introducing an element of scarcity and the actual physical transfer of an object from person to person, the discovery becomes valuable, social and tangible again., says X-II’s developer,

Created by design lab Beyond.io, the X-II tapes add a physical element to a music, a medium that is more or less completely digitised nowadays.