Anyone use 8tracks or other post-Muxtape sites?

edited January 2009 in Music Industry 2.0
A month or so ago I set out to catalogue some of the alternatives to the late, great Muxtape. The fiending was just too hard for me to ignore.

If you want to read the blog entry on it, it's here, but the gist is Opentape is a great app to promote your own music or run a private directory, but is a huge legal liability to share with others. Favtape tries to be too many things at once. I don't really like blip.fm, but if you're a regular Twitter user (I'm not), it's a godsend.

The favorite I came across was 8tracks. A lot of it works sort of like muxtape, but without the random stumble-upon functionality that I miss so dearly. There's also a few restrictions on playback (it randomizes other peoples' mix orders after two plays so it's not equal to music-on-demand,) and the owner pays through the nose for licensing as a webcaster, but it's really a pretty cool site. Anyone here use it?

My mixes are here. Most of my mixes are pretty ugly abrasive stuff right now. I might recommend the Jan. 2009 mix for something palatable or Rastafuturism if you're into reggae/dub/etc.

But I wanna find more people to follow with good mixes, so if you use it, post here!

Comments

  • edited January 2009
    Oh man you totally missed out. Muxtape.com was the greatest thing ever.

    Here's the rundown
    * Upload songs
    * Arrange them with intuitive drag-and-drop
    * Link people to the streaming mix you've created to share music with them

    It didn't have a search feature or anything other than an ability to follow people, kind of like Twitter, so you were sort of pushed into discovering things by just looking at the mixes of people who liked your mix or clicking on a big randomized list on the mainpage. I learned about so much new music that way. SO damn fun.

    The owner was negotiating with each major label to achieve a licensing deal -- he had every interest in keeping it legal. But even as deals were being hammered out with the constituent labels, the RIAA came and put the hammer down, effectively squashing an amazing site that everyone loved and, incredibly, wasting the time and billable hours of all the lawyers that the labels had invested in creating these licensing agreements. The RIAA basically went over the heads of its constituent labels and squashed Muxtape.

    Now it's sort of in transition to being sort of a stripped-down, easier to use and less ugly version of Myspace for bands. I'm sure it'll be neat, but nothing compared to how great it was before. Hands-down my single favorite music-sharing innovation online ever.

    edit: And while I said I don't really like blip.fm, I really do have to plug it again if you use Twitter. Blip.fm on its own is unexciting. But if you use twitter, the able to tweet streaming music to people is really sweet.
  • For UKers, there's Spotify. The tracklist is limited, but basically (visual) ad-supported music-listening. Personal playlists, shared playlists, linking tracks to other people, all possible.

    For non-UKers, there's... uhm, Spotify (providing that method still works).
  • Looks like they encrypt the connections and are invite-only now, making it pretty tough to get around. Looks like a pretty awesome service, though. How extensive is the library?

    How intrusive is the advertising? Is there a subscription other than the "day pass" to get around it? How much?
  • Muxtape was great, and there was a pseudo search feature that sort of helped you discover music as opposed to just hear what you wanted to hear.
  • To be honest, the library was pretty small when I was using it. I haven't actually used it much since, but you never know, their library could increase.

    Advertising is very non-intrusive - most I saw was a sidebar on the program.
  • That's kinda neat. Really that's about the most I'd accept with a limited library. I had a free subscription to Rhapsody as part of my broadband account's incentives and it was neat but the library was pretty crappy because so many bands refuse to license more than 30-second clips and lots of underground stuff just wasn't on it.

    It was awesome for stand-up comedy, though. I'd still be on it if they wouldn't keep mixing up my free account and my former pay account and trying to bill me for free service.
  • I have been spending a lot of time on Thesixtyone since JoCo mentioned it a while ago. You can set up playlists and listen to other peoples playlists. I've found most of the new music I listen to through them. And now that scrobbling to Lastfm has been enabled, more of my world has been connected.
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