January 30th, 2009 – Ah, the early 90′s. Remember how hot mix tapes were? My friends and I would record music off the radio, and make our own mixes with a two decked tape recorder. We’d even mix our own band’s music in with the mainstream stuff. Yup, mix tapes were pretty fashionable and, as such, were immortalized in many a film. In retrospect, all that stuff is pretty similar to the file-sharing and bit-torrenting hoopla that is going on right now.
Many of today’s downloading generation wouldn’t have been old enough to experience the mix tape, or even its successor the mix CD. But the hip gen-X and gen-Y remember, and that demographic was the basis of the Muxtape community. When Muxtape launched, users could upload their own mixes to be downloaded by all. As is the custom these days, the RIAA swooped down with the talons of its lawyers and put the hurt on Muxtape.
Muxtape has now relaunched as a service that allows independent bands to post music for download. The interface is very simplistic, reminding me of mid-90′s web design, but that’s part of its charm. The idea is to get the music with a minimum of fuss and pomp. It looks pretty cool, and there are some notable indie acts releasing music on there.
It will be interesting to see if Muxtape succeeds with its new format. Many services before it have been hit by the RIAA and moved to the indie-band model. Whether or not mainstream users will give Muxtape a chance is yet to be seen. In my experience, they like bloated and busy MySpace pages rather than stuff that’s elegantly simple like Muxtape.
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