To unify the songs together smoothly, a single backing beat may be added as background throughout the megamix, although this is not a must.
The purposes of the megamix, he argues, is "to present a musical collage riding on a uniting groove to create a type of pastiche that allows the listener to recall a whole time period and not necessarily one single artist or composition.
[1] Navas cites hip-hop artist Grandmaster Flash's "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel" (1981), particularly the manner in which the track cuts and switches between different songs, as an influence on megamixes "that were produced in the music studio from actual samples", naming the 1984 electro funk track "Tommy Boy Megamix", containing samples of the most popular songs on hip-hop label Tommy Boy Records, as an example.
[3] An exception to the popularity was the United Kingdom until the turn of the 1990s, when megamixes by Technotronic, Black Box and Snap!
became popular, leading to further megamix hits from Gloria Estefan and Boney M.[2] As of 1997, Masterton believed the fad had passed in the UK.