DISQUS

What I really want to see from an imeem application is the ability to record and upload straight to the site. The one massive win that imeem delivers over every other music site is the cloud sourcing of its music library, but you have to upload from a PC, imagine if you could just record and upload anything around you. Audioblog on the go... or more likely record some concert moments and share them with everyone who couldn't get tickets.

Re: Steve Darmis
"I BOUGHT the music I used on itunes, and now they are saying I can’t use the song in a sideshow I made?"

No you *licensed* the music for limited personal use from iTunes, and that limited license never included universal sync rights.

It's not even sync rights, warner has pulled all their music from youtube, because they don't think they're getting compensated fairly. Clearly they're getting more money from myspace, lala and imeem and want to get an similar deal from youtube.

There are other more established alternatives - imeem.com and projectplaylist - launched in 2004 and 2006 respectivley, they're both about 100 times more popular than muxtape ever was (imeem gets 27million users, playlist is about 10million)

of course popular is not the same as cool, they've both been invaded by myspace users, so while there's every track you'd ever want to listen to you have to dig it out from dross by lil' wayne.

Dude all those sites ripped off playlist.com, which in turn ripped off imeem.com

both those sites have 100 times the users of muxtape.

Playlist.com uses the 'we don't host files argument'
imeem lets users upload but has filters to identify the content and make sure the artists get paid.

I know exactly what's going to happen, right now muxtape is talking to audible magic or gracenote about their filtering system so that they can filter what songs appear on the site. Then when it comes back up there'll be no more tracks by any other popular artist.

As for alternatives it shocks me that people don't know that imeem has been doing everything muxtape does since 2004, they did get sued and they installed filters, but they also spent the next year getting deals with all the record labels so that users can legally build their Rolling Stones mixtape. This has helped imeem become one of the biggest music sites on the internet

Muxtape Popular?
By what measure? If you look at every web tracking site it shows it with less than 100,000 users per month which is about 1% of other music sites like last.fm, playlist.com and of course imeem.com.
(imeem has allowed users to upload tunes and make playlists for a long time before muxtape decided that limiting users to 12 tracks was innovative)

But I've always said this was going to happen to muxtape - it'll make deals, start paying labels and then cover the site with Ads to pay for those deals. Meanwhile the bloggers who think it's popular will move on to the next 'cool' service and muxtape will wither.

Pandora on the other hand deserves our respect, they really did everything by the books and the copyright board has done its best to stop this being a legitimate business model.

Oh sure, pandora merely came up because it's the other somewhat established site doing the music recommendations. There are many more that are less well known - finetune, jango etc and even imeem has a recommendation system, but that isn't heavily featured ont its interface.

Bias isn't immediately bad, just because someone has a bias doesn't mean that their ideas are wrong.

I can see your argument that even though imeem is more popular and has a larger catalog than last.fm that larger catalog dilutes the listener base at the same time making the 'bigger is better' argument somewhat moot. Myspace, Facebook and youtube are also huge sites but not focussed on music.

Apple could certainly benefit, but, CBS got there first.

Instead apple could look at Pandora which has a similar recommendation system. However, I'm trying to think of companies that Apple has acquired, and I'm coming up blank. I don't think Apple likes to buy this kind of technology, rather it would build it in house.

"Funny thing is, I thinking about writing my next "What websites should musicians be on?" blog post about Last.fm."

but it's only part two, last I looked last.fm was ranked #11 on compete's list of popular music sites. I believe your priorities show an irrational favoritism towards last.fm

See that's the thing, last.fm isn't hugely popular, there are many more popular sites which Warner would have to think harder about cutting off. But last.fm is small enough that Warners isn't losing a whole lot of revenue while using this hardball negotiation tactic. Besides, it'll still be getting payouts for the radio streams, which make up a larger proportion of last.fm's output.

I'm pretty sure that last.fm will meet Warner's desired rates and things will be back to normal. Last.fm is in a crowded market right now and if it's missing one of the big labels it'll have a knock on effect.

What you're missing is that warner talks about imeem as an investment, which means they have equity in the company. Same is true for myspace music. Warner wins when imeem grows, so it would be logical to use their music to make imeem a more attractive destination than last.fm

Plus, imeem is now way more popular than last.fm, so it's not like they're shutting down their flagship deal. Last.fm's on demand music hasn't been the huge driver of user interest that they were proposing.

"But because they have negotiated with the record companies, you can’t listen to anything unless you’re a member. "

I'm not sure your statement is correct regarding membership requirements at imeem, I don't see any forced sign ups right now.
Regardless - are you implying that imeem is a less functional service than muxtape because it has become legal? If that's the case doesn't that imply that muxtape's advantage is entirely temporary, since it will either become (a) legal and limited like imeem or (b) shut down entirely.

Ahh don't worry, muxtape is late to the game by a long way
mixwit was letting people do this before muxtape was launched....
and seeqpod was letting people make playlists from music found around the web before anyone had heard of mixwit....
but seeqpod was pre-empted by projectplaylist....
except projectplaylist was beaten to the punch by finetune....

and.... in 2004 a company called imeem.com launched, imeem has something like 20million users making 'playlists' from tracks uploaded to the site by themselves or other users. They're by far the biggest site doing this and have managed to negotiate their way into all the record deals and stuff that's needed to make this legal.

So, you can tell yourself that hearphone was a more original idea than muxtape, but by my measure it's the least original of all the sites I've mentioned. But if you had hearphone running before imeem, then you might think of it as a missed opportunity.

re: hype machine vs muxtape

All great sites need to make compromises to their mission to stay alive, the best example is imeem.com which 18 months ago was doing everything muxtape was doing, but then they got sued and had to cut deals so that they have ads which pay for the music. (now I think about it, If I cared about the artist I'd be posting my mixes at imeem so that the artists got paid)

Right now muxtape has no ads so it's not making any money, and it'll soon get sued and be faced with either a long court battle, or paying the artists, either of which cost money so you're going to see the cheapflights banner on muxtape soon, or even worse, ads will precede the music.

re: searching for tracks vs uploading tracks
"Mixwit is like projectplaylist in that you search the internet for the tracks you want and add them. I vastly prefer the latter approach. It's faster and more fun."

You appear to be unaway that on imeem you can add any music that any other user has uploaded to your playlist, I think there must be something like 5 million tracks on there by now.

Basicly both mixwit and muxtape compare poorly to imeem or projectplaylist, if these guys can get funded by VC's I've got a social network that they might want to fund.