The Live Lab
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By the numbers

Every track on a Live Lab mixtape is a minute at most, so the length of a mixtape is roughly how many producers showed up that week. Here’s what four years of mixtapes say about which briefs bring people in.

Challenges
149
Hours of music
29
Tracks, roughly
1700+
A typical week
11 min

Every week

Mixtape length, challenge by challenge

002 · 2022151 · 2026

Minutes per mixtape; hover or tap a bar for the challenge. The busiest stretch was winter 2024 into 2025 (Medieval Hip Hop II, No Drums, Romanian Choir), and 2026 has been quieter, which is why we’re opening the Lab up to everyone. In amber, two special formats that ran past the scale: Planetary Boundaries (61 min, three parts) and Finish A Track (45 min, full-length tracks).

What works

Typical mixtape length by kind of brief

  • Remix / re-voice · 415.8 min
  • Record your own sounds · 713.9 min
  • Personal / community · 1612.6 min
  • Sample pack / provided material · 1911.6 min
  • Technical restriction · 1910.4 min
  • Story / theme / scenario · 5110.1 min
  • Seasonal · 39.6 min
  • Genre / style brief · 279.4 min

Median minutes, with the number of challenges of each kind. Briefs that hand you something to start from (a track to remix, a sound to record, another member to write about) pull in the most people. Very narrow genres are the hardest sell: Drift Phonk, Grime Again and Strawberry Flavour Kirschen Kore were some of the quietest weeks. Whether a member curated the week, or how long the brief was, made no real difference.

When

Typical mixtape length by month

12
11
11
11
10
10
7
8
11
13
13
14
JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec

Summer is quiet; the dark months are when the Lab gets loud. October to December, with the Christmas challenges and the Schrottwichteln exchange, have been the busiest time of the year.

Hall of fame

The ten longest mixtapes

  1. 1018Planetary Boundaries61:06
  2. 2113Finish A Track44:48
  3. 3020Re-voice A Soundtrack27:24
  4. 4088Musical Schrottwichteln25:36
  5. 5097Medieval Hip Hop II22:48
  6. 6098No Drums22:12
  7. 7134The EP: Mid Part20:24
  8. 8094Romanian Choir20:18
  9. 9031Things Are Not What They Seem18:36
  10. 10033Noise In Harmony18:06

Numbers from the SoundCloud running time of each mixtape, 002–151 (no mixtape survives for 001 or 100, and 137 has no running time). Length is only a proxy: some tracks are shorter than a minute and a few briefs allowed longer pieces. From Challenge 152 on, the Lab counts every submission directly.