What Does Fanmix Mean?
Fandom CultureA curated playlist made as a fanwork — songs assembled to evoke a character, ship, or fic, traditionally with cover art and liner notes explaining the choices. The mixtape, fandomized.
Fanmix in Practice
Fanmixes flourished in LiveJournal fandom as downloadable mixes with designed covers and track-by-track commentary, treated as full creative works that could anchor challenges and accompany big bang fics. The form's craft is argumentative curation: a good fanmix makes a case — this is what the ship sounds like, this is the fic's emotional arc in eleven songs — and the liner notes were half the art. Streaming platforms transformed the practice into shareable playlists, trading the cover-art ritual for accessibility, and 'playlist for my fic' remains a standard authorial side-work. The fanmix's DNA also survives in fandom's broader song-association culture, where entire ships become permanently attached to specific songs.
Example usage
"The author linked a fanmix for the fic and track seven recontextualized the whole final chapter."
Related Terms
Fanwork
The umbrella term for any creative work made by fans from existing media — fic, art, vids, podfic, mixes, cosplay, meta, crafts. The category AO3 and the OTW exist to host and defend.
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Fanvid
A music video edited from source footage by a fan — clips cut to a song to argue a ship, celebrate a character, or reframe a story. The art form is called vidding, its makers vidders.
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Fanart
Visual art of existing media made by fans — illustrations, comics, paintings, digital pieces — spanning every style from quick sketches to gallery-grade work. Fanfiction's sister discipline.
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Big Bang
A fandom challenge in which writers commit to producing a long fic — commonly 10,000 words or more — and artists claim summaries to create companion art, with everything posting together on a schedule.
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More Fandom Culture Terms
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