I stumbled across Muxtape when doctorvee linked me to a cool litle Yahoo! pipe which utilised your last.fm charts to try to find suitable Muxtapes. Anyway, since then doctorvee wrote a really good post about muxtape, and mixtapes in general. Alex Navarro formerly of Gamespot also gave Muxtape some good coverage. I am also surprised that Muxtape hasn’t been shut down yet. It seems like exactly the kind of thing that the music industry would crack down on faster than Sonic The Hedgehog, yet it has survived so far. I can’t help but hope that perhaps the music industry is going to deal with this in a much more mature way than they’ve dealt with other aspects of the internet. As doctorvee pointed out, Muxtape’s saving grace may just be that there is no easy way to download the songs. Though it has to be said, you would expect the music industry to want some sort of royality even for streaming tracks. It falls directly into the area of the last.fm streaming deal, but Muxtape has no adverts to cover the royalties unlike last.fm. The recent appearance of a buy from Amazon link may just be enough to keep the industry at bay.
I may only be young (20 for stat fans) but I used to delight in making mixtapes. Sure tapes were a bit past it by then, but that didn’t stop me from trying to make excellent mixes. As I grew older I became much more interested in track transitions, to this day I still wonder about possible permutations. I very rarely get the chance to make proper mixtapes these days though, I’ve made playlists for parties but nothing more really. The last big attempts were for the two mix-minidiscs (ouch that sounds cackhanded) I created for Krystal before I met her. Even these were created on computer however, it has to be said the ability to create quick playlists and instantly try lots of tracks when you’re trying to get the right sort of transition is a real boon to the mixtape creation process. It does take away some of the romantic aspect of it though.
Muxtape offered the chance to take time to create a mixtape again and even for that I’m happy. That it might give me the chance to stumble upon some new bands is merely a bonus for me. It has to be said though, to stumble upon new bands you pretty much do have to make use of this excellent Yahoo! pipe. Even then, you need a Last.FM profile to be able to take advantage of it. Muxtape imposes some interesting restrictions on the process though. You get 12 tracks and no track can be bigger than 10MB, the latter condition did pose some problems for me. Originally my muxtape, which was created at first in iTunes, contained songs of more than nine minutes from both Youthmovies and Cats And Cats And Cats, however they both clocked in at over 10MB and necessitated substitute tracks.
I had a theme in mind when I was creating my Muxtape, that theme is summed up in the caption: confusion. As a whole the tracks convery a feeling of confusion, to me at least. That’s not necesarilly a flow thing either, the muxtape was designed with a sensible flow; a natural beginning, middle and end. Indeed I started with my favourite opening track ever (it’s stereoscopic heaven) and ended with soemthing I can only describe as dance-tastic. It’s not just a collection of songs by my favourite bands either, indeed there are some notable omissions when you glance at my Last.FM charts and compare it to the tracklisting of the Muxtape. Indeed one track in particular, This Town Need Guns – 26 is dancier than 4, was included purely because I’d recently seen this awesomely cute video for it.
One last note on Muxtape though is that it doesn’t seem to work particularly well on Firefox, so I suggest you try it in an alternative browser if you have issues with it. It seems to work intermittently, but if it doesn’t work, really do try it in another browser. I’d love to hear your comments on my Muxtape as well, all are welcome.
muxtape? more like Schmucktape
nah seriously, the ability to do the whole mixtape thing online is great but it’s not exactly new, in particular imeem.com has been doing this for the last 2 years. And after 2 years their site is nicer, their tools are better and the selection is nothing short of jawdropping. There are something like 20million people already making mixtapes on imeem.com
From a cursory glance at imeem I think I immediately worked out why imeem hasn’t taken off. Apart from the fact it doesn’t have a cutesy mixtape-a-like name, the site just looks ugly. It has adverts, it looks too much like a social network. The site is your typical explosion in a web design factory.
I can’t talk about the tools because I didn’t try them, but I didn’t really have a problem with Muxtape’s. Perhaps a mutliple-upload tool would be nice, chances are it would time out due to file size though.
“worked out why imeem hasn’t taken off.”
Erm excuse me, but it’s the most popular web2.0 music site on the internet according to every web stats tracker you look at – alexa, compete, comscore or quantcast all put it with twice as many users as last.fm (the second most popular site). I saw one quote which said that 100million people hear music played from imeem.com every month.
I agree the ads are all over the place, but the reason for the ads is that they share 50% of the advertising revenue with the artists. Either muxtape is going to get sued to death or it’s going to try a similar deal and get covered in ads. At that point I imagine all the blog reading indie hipsters will complain and find a new site which is small enough that it hasn’t got sued.
I’ve already covered the legal aspect, and that I’m surprised it has shut down.
What I mean to say about imeem is that it certainly hasn’t caught the imagination of anybody in my neck of the internet woods, or my neck of the real life woods. Muxtape has, last.fm definitely has.
Perhaps imeem is really popular in countries outwith the UK. That’s fine, but from my frame of reference imeem is nothing because I haven’t come across it, and nobody I’ve spoken to has. I’m sorry if this offends you, but it’s just what happens to be the case.
I’m sorry I offended you in some way by suggesting that imeem hasn’t taken off, but like I said if you put yourself in my shoes; imeem hasn’t taken off. I can see that seems like an inaccurate statement from your point of view, but there’s no need to get upset about a difference of opinion due to different perspectives eh?
Oh I certainly didn’t mean to offend, or to be offended, no problem there, I just dropped in the tracking numbers just to put your statement in perspective.
I mean what it really shows is that while thousands of bloggers may be talking about a site, this may have no actual correlation with the popularity of the site in question.
Dave Porter has been tracking the popularity of web2.0 sites over the past few months
http://davidporter.wordpress.com/2008/04/06/top-25-music-sites-march-2008/
In terms of percentage growth muxtape is the winner this month.
All that stuff is missing the point of my post though. My post wasn’t saying Muxtape was the best, or even my favourite music site. (That would go to Last.FM.) Muxtape for me is definitely the closest thing on the internet to making a mixtape. Sure it’s useless for just about anything else, but it does what it sets out to do well.
I just suggested that imeem hasn’t taken off because so far as I can tell, imeem hasn’t taken off in the UK. Also I can’t comment about thousands of bloggers, I only read five. I was making no correlation between blog posts and popularity, I merely said as far as I was aware imeem hasn’t taken off.
Regardless, I’m not really interested in relative popularity of websites. I use what I like and recommend that others do the same, popularity rarely factors in to that.
After reading this post I decided to check it out myself and I made a pretty bog-standard playlist that made a slight attempt to describe a tale of finding love then losing it. I also made a brief post on my own blog which I have re-restarted.
Yeah, it’s a cool website. I haven’t changed my muxtape since then but fully intend to do another one at some point.
I’ll be sure to check out your post / muxtape when I have a chance.