There are a few new online sites that let you create online mix tapes, which seems like a great idea to let people share, promote, and discover new music online. At least if the record companies had a clue, they would see that. But for now, all these sites are probably on pretty shaky legal ground, so user beware…
The ones I looked at recently were: Muxtape, MixWit, and Favtape.
Of this bunch of sites, Muxtape was the first I became aware of and is still probably the best known. They let you upload 12 songs that form your online mix. This sucks because once you do one, you want to do another. Also, 12 songs is pretty limited. You can, of course, register multiple times, but that’s just dumb. Did you have just 1 mix tape when you were a kid? I liked it because you uploaded your own songs so could pick literally anything and any version of a song. However, it would have been nice to upload multiple songs at a time, instead of one by one. I thought it odd that a newly uploaded song was added to the beginning of your mix. Seems like adding to the end would make a lot more sense. Would be cooler if I could rip the player off the page.
MixWit lets you search for tracks on the web using either SkreemR or Seeqpod. Both of those sites basically scrape music off the web. So MixWit is avoiding some legal action (by not having or even finding any files) while almost guaranteeing that the music you use is of dubious origin. You can also point to a specific url, which could be your own stash I suppose. Personally, I couldn’t find any of the songs I wanted for my mix so I gave up. I dig their retro tape styles though – very cool. They let you create multiple mixes and have a pop-out player.
Favtape is a little different – it basically hooks up to your last.fm account and lets people listen similar to Muxtape. That’s cool, but obviously not a specific mix. They also have ways to listen to just the top 100 from last.fm, top per genre, etc and the best is the top per year of release, which is a riot. But ultimately, it’s not really a mix tape kind of thing like Muxtape and MixWit.
Some day, someone will figure this out and we can all get busy making public mix tapes. :)