Just spotted this site. Kind of cool - music that’s apparently not available digitally anywhere else. Some nice stuff. MP3 format (320 kbps) with no Digital Rights Management.Â
Sounds OK right? It is, except it seems on the pricey side. You can by individual tracks for GBP 0.99. Whole albums seem to be priced the same way - ie an 8 track album will cost you GBP 7.92, but if you want a double album it will cost a bomb! Unless the site has recognised where I am via my IP address, it would appear to be a UK only thing, but I can’t verify this because the ‘About’ etc stuff on the site hasn’t been built yet!
Worth a look though. There’s clearly not really enough there yet for it to be useful, but with a more serious amount of music it could be pretty amazing.
Wow- I guess more and more people are getting time and/or money to do interesting stuff with music. Mixwit is kind of like the muxtape thing I mentioned the other day but not quite as nice looking. Nice cassette turning animation as you listen though! The link above is to a tasty latin jazz/afro funk mix that I happened on totally at random as the first thing I clicked on, which could be a good sign!
An explosion of interest and blogging in the last couple of days for http://muxtape.com/, and you can see why.
It’s a simple idea (make an online mixtape) that takes advantage of some nice accessible technologies and makes you think - sure - I’ll do that. Hey presto, you have a really nice music site up and running within a few days! I made one but there are only a few tracks on it now.
The owner is doing some really quick development, adding new features daily. The front page currently has some randomly (?) picked links to users, much like the first Musical Taste homepage did. Except on Musical Taste you couldn’t listen to tracks, which is a big difference!
Muxtape is so elegant and appealing that it’s hard to imagine anyone kicking up a stink about it, but hang on a minute - 99% of the MP3s people are uploading are copyrighted! So - it remains to be seen if Muxtape can pull off a YouTube and somehow deal with the legal problems later. I hope it can. I guess the more users it gets, the more likely that is…
Footnote: I had a similar idea once!: compare Radio Delicado with my muxtape…
Last.fm have a cool new tool - enter your last.fm username and it will suggest which bands you should go and see at the SXSW festival.
Recommended (pretty accurately!) for me:
- The Cowsills (this makes me sad because one of them died in the New Orleans floods)
- Friends of Dean Martinez (I saw them I think 12 years go in NYC. They were amazing. I liked their later records less, but their first couple really got that late night moody twangy cinematic thing across well)
- Jens Lekman (Yes, I think he’s pretty cool)
I think all their tool is doing is presenting you with direct hits (ie bands playing who you have played tracks by) and near misses (bands it thinks you will like because it thinks they sound like something you’ve listened to).
Still, pretty cool. Shame I don’t have the time to make it to Austin, TX!
