Discovering New Music With Muxtape
Finding new interesting music can be hard if you don’t know where to look. I stand by the statement that I went to college during the best four years for discovering new music. Everyone was using Napster to discover songs from people across the country as well as finding MP3s out on our school’s network. Times have changed, and widely available free paths to music have been shut down for the most part. The common person is limited to the 15 songs that are in rotation on the local terrestrial radio stations, paying for satellite radio, or whatever song is featured on the latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy. The internet has really opened up a lot of opportunities for a more interactive way to find music such as Pandora, or LastFM. I prefer Pandora because of it’s super simple interface.
There is a new interesting site that just hit the streets called MuxTape. It’s a site where you can upload songs out of your personal collection (up to 12 tracks, each <10MB) to share as an online mixtape. This has potential to take off, because while you can personalize and share “stations” with Pandora and LastFM, you can’t share a specific group of songs. The interface is simple and huge and very easy to use, but I would like more ability to customize the mix. Like giving it a name (Summer Mix ‘96, or something else cheesy like that), uploading an image, or a directory of muxtapes to discover. Bands can use this as a simple place to send people to listen to their new releases. I’ve already found a sweet band called MGMT from this muxtape that I never would have found otherwise.
Check out my muxtape @ jeffchin21.muxtape.com. Leave me a comment to your muxtape if you end up making one.
