Muxtape: Bringing Back The Art of The Mixtape
So I’ve just recently discovered Muxtape. It’s a site that allows you to make a little “mixtape” of songs by uploading and then choosing which order they go in. The interface is pretty easy to figure out. You click on a song (or just the area around the song) and it’ll play automatically. It was working pretty well last night but for some reason the thing is choking in Firefox for me right now (and making Safari crash AND making IE run out of memory), yay for compatibility testing!
Anyway, the site is neat because if you’re as old as I am, you might remember making mix tapes for your friends. There was an art to this. Instead of the crazy-huge capacities of an MP3 player that you have these days, tapes were limited to like, 90 minutes or something. And the order mattered too since tapes didn’t have skip functionality (unless you had a sweet-ass walkman with that feature built-in). Muxtape sort of forces a restriction on you by forcing you to choose only 12 songs, and by different artists (no dupes). Mix tapes were a labor of love and works of art! Muxtape is easier, but it also sorta reminds me of when I made mix tapes way back when.
So a few criticisms. First off, while Muxtape tries to keep it real by limiting you to the number of songs and artists, it’s still probably way illegal. I wonder why the site hasn’t been shut down yet. Not saying I’d like the site to be shut down, but the reality is that it’s totally un-legit. You might say it’s fine because it only lets you stream, but using Firebug, you can pretty easily tell what the address is for the MP3.
Also, lol at the constructed urls of the MP3s (the first get arg is “PLEASE=DO_NOT_STEAL_MUSIC”).
Last.fm also pretty much is THE place to go for finding new music, and they have tons of searchable (which you could argue is kind of important!) tracks available. Though I did try and recreate my mixtape on last.fm and two artists were missing (one is the IBM computer “singing” Daisy Bell) and of the 10 remaining songs, only 6 had the full tracks playable
So at least Muxtape wins as far as playability goes (though I did have to upload them myself)! There are probably some big legal issues that make it impossible for last.fm to do what Muxtape does. That’s probably good, since last.fm makes money for themselves and more importantly, artists, while Muxtape just makes money for themeselves (if you don’t count Amazon MP3 cuts going to artists). Last.fm makes artists money simply by streaming their music; no buying required.
Anyway, if you want to check out my own mix, go here. Hopefully it’s varied enough to be worthy of mixtape status. You must understand, I’m a bit rusty.
Comments
Leave a Comment
Comments are moderated and won't appear immediately after submission.
Yes muxtape is basicly trying the strategy of trying to build a big enough userbase to demonstrate the value of their service before they get sued. Which brings me to the site which you didn’t mention – imeem.com muxtape’s entire website is basicly a stripped down copy of the playlist feature from imeem.com – imeem is best described as ‘youtube for music’ (although imeem only has 20million users compared to yotube’s 100million). it’s been around since 2004. And for the last year it’s been totally legal. they got sued and instead of fighting it they made deals to make sure the artists get paid, and now it looks like muxtape has copied Like last.fm imeem also has some limits on tracks – no beatles tracks allowed. But you really should check it out and compare it, as far as web2.0 music sites go imeem is the most popular with last.fm in second place.
For some reason I forgot about imeem. I thought it wasn’t as big as last.fm either. I guess I could check it out again. For some reason it just doesn’t look that great, though.
According to Compete.com it’s more than twice as popular as last.fm in the US – here’s a nice compilation of stats. http://davidporter.wordpress.com/2008/04/06/top-25-music-sites-march-2008/ I’ve read a few other blog posts that speculate as to the real longevity of muxtape, by the time it’s big enough to sign major label licenses it’s going to be competing with myspace, imeem and last.fm, and with VC’s tightening their belts the money to pay the labels isn’t going to be forthcoming. So it’ll probably go indie only, but even then it’ll need a ton of cash to pay salaries and infrastructure so it’ll either start spamming ads all over the site, or start charging users for the site. The only other option is a radio type stream, but then it’ll be competing in an even more crowded market.
Any good mix ends with Rick Astley! Sweet. Pretty cool idea they have here. One thing this website doesn’t have that mix tapes had is the ability to personalize the tape itself. You can draw stars and lions and put cool stickers of Paula Abdul (when she used to be hot). Kudos though. I think I’ll make a mix too, and it is also going to end with Rick Asley. p.s. My first walkman didn’t even have a rewind button. I think the brand was GTX or something like that. I later bought a real Sony Walkman. It had auto reverse a digital clock an FM tuner and even a rewind button.