Wednesday
Oct152008
8tracks: Our Muxtape Alternative of Choice
Wednesday, October 15, 2008 at 04:44PM
Since the untimely pseudo-demise of Muxtape, we, like many of you, have been searching for a tolerable alternative. We've taken our time in doing so to ensure that we find what suits us best. Our research has pointed us to 8tracks. Its upsides seem to outweigh its downsides. Here's what Wired had to say about it:
We don't fancy the service confining us to eight tracks per mix. We do, however, like that our playlists will truly work like analog mixes in that the play is linear. You can skip forward but not back. A progress bar is present as a simple point of reference rather than an actual tool—you can't skip around within a track. Once you've skipped through all the tracks, you'll have to refresh the page to regain access to the play button.
While these limitations will be annoying to many, we appreciate 8track's willingness to tame some of our bad listening habits. In a sense, 8tracks is a more successful mirror of mix-making nostalgia than Muxtape ever was. It insists that you listen to the mix as intended.
However, the 8tracks folks fail to mention that when you embed your mix, its tracks will be shuffled at random rather than playing in your own assigned order, which sort of nixes some of the key tenants of mix-making: sequence, climax, resolution, etc. This is probably the most annoying component of the service, but we're willing to deal. Update: It appears this phenomenon was some sort of bug we were experiencing. Our playlist is in order now.
But more importantly than all that, 8tracks qualifies artists for royalty rates, which is beyond awesome, and probably means we'll be doing a lot of these.
Here's our first mix on the service, which happens to be our first off-topic music post since last year. We figured if we're going to go on a tangent, we'd go the whole nine yards and make it as polarizingly off-topic as possible. These selections are dedicated to the whites out there who keep our clumsy little blog afloat:
"8tracks allows users to upload eight tracks, with no more than two by the same artist, and then follows the internet radio model of playing the songs in order (as opposed to on an on-demand basis) in order to qualify for SoundExchange's royalty rates for small webcasters. And unlike Muxtape, it lets you embed mixes online."
We don't fancy the service confining us to eight tracks per mix. We do, however, like that our playlists will truly work like analog mixes in that the play is linear. You can skip forward but not back. A progress bar is present as a simple point of reference rather than an actual tool—you can't skip around within a track. Once you've skipped through all the tracks, you'll have to refresh the page to regain access to the play button.
While these limitations will be annoying to many, we appreciate 8track's willingness to tame some of our bad listening habits. In a sense, 8tracks is a more successful mirror of mix-making nostalgia than Muxtape ever was. It insists that you listen to the mix as intended.
But more importantly than all that, 8tracks qualifies artists for royalty rates, which is beyond awesome, and probably means we'll be doing a lot of these.
Here's our first mix on the service, which happens to be our first off-topic music post since last year. We figured if we're going to go on a tangent, we'd go the whole nine yards and make it as polarizingly off-topic as possible. These selections are dedicated to the whites out there who keep our clumsy little blog afloat:
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