Muxtape is a new service that basically allows you to quickly set up an account and upload 12 songs that become available to stream as your digital mixtape. This is a great way to share music with people quickly be simply uploadeding the song to Muxtape and distributing the url. Its been literally a day since Muxtape launched and already it has exploded! Its been featured on Wired, Darling Fireball and 37signals, the site has been reblogged on Tumblr over a hundred times, its an upcoming story on digg and not to forget it already has thousands of users! As if that weren’t enough as of today it already has a new awesome feature allowing people to see sets of randomly selected muxtapes on the main page. The idea of the project is brilliant. The problem with “mixed tapes” whether you used a CD, flash drive or an actual tape you were using a physical medium to give music to someone, music is all digital now and digitally distributed, mixtapes were obsolete and the idea nearly became extinct.
Justin its creator basically realized since the music is digital so should be the medium on which it is distributed. The result was a super simple, totally legal and extremely effective, totally digital and high quality way to share music with firends. I can see this becoming as big as facebook or myspace. Everyone will have their social network accounts and a Muxtape to share music with people. Justin says he’s working on a bunch more features, like added customization and RSS.
The only hopes I have for this are that it doesn’t try to integrate, like say in the future you will be able to embed your muxtape on a blog or in facebook or something. It would totally defeat the idea and purpose. And the only additional feature I’d like to see is a favorite system similar to vimeo, so if you see a muxtape you like you can favorite it and have it appear in a list that you can check out at a later time. This could also double as a friend system and a follow system, you (and possibly others if the favorites were made public) will know who your friends are / what their muxtapes are and maybe the possibility of a email notification if someone changes their mixtape. But other than that, the formula for how it works is perfect, it works and it shouldn’t be messed with. There were a bunch of cool webapps I can you think of that were near perfect for the function that they served but down the line the developers kept adding/subtracting/revamping and eventually ended up ruining the formula that worked so well.
Muxtape is a great way to share and discover music by bringing back the mixtape into the digital era. Get your muxtape @ muxtape.com. You can check out ours at alx.muxtape.com and erick.muxtape.com
-Alx-
I don’t subscribe to and rarely read Rolling Stone magazine. In fact I don’t read any music magazines really unless I hang out for a while in a mag shop. I know right? I talk about and review music and don’t read any magazines like NME or Rolling Stone or anything? Well right now I’m just relying on the internets until maybe I go back to school and maybe I’ll start subscribing. But the thing is half the fun of discovering new music is searching for it on your own, no? Either a friend sends you some songs or tells you about it, you are sitting in a restaurant and overhear someone talking about it, you hang out at record or music stores and just listen to what they play on their speakers and go up and ask whats being played, you dive into myspace or search around and small obscure music blogs and sites. All this may be more unnecessary work, but its that much more satisfying when you find a real gem of music all by yourself. And often times if you know for good places to look for new music, you’ll find out about a group even before the mag does or does a story on them. Sometimes they won’t be big enough for print media just yet. So I say keep your $30 dollar subscription fee and just go out like a blood hound and find the music on your own.
