In the olden days, boys and girls used to spend hours using double cassette decks to carefully craft mix tapes to share in order to express their innermost longings in an artsy way. It sometimes led to love and inadvertently increased record sales by sharing a little taste of previously undiscovered bands.
Then came Napster and the CD burner, making the process even easier. Finally, mix sharing was thoroughly disrupted by online "mixtape" sharing sites such as the popular Muxtape, whose sharing function was disabled by the RIAA over a year ago. Following the closure of that site, we posted a list of alternatives last summer. Already, 60 percent of them are now offline for various reasons, in at least one case due to major label lawsuits.
These online mix-sharing sites are clearly something of a moving target, because they tend to operate under the radar or pay unmanageable licensing fees. But we've turned up a fresh batch you can use to share virtual mix tapes with friends and strangers around the world, without paying a cent.
Without further ado, here are the eight best ways to share playlists (honorable mentions below):
1. QCMixtapes or MixCloud: If you're a disc jockey who records your live sets, a bedroom DJ who handcrafts mixes by adding cross-fades manually, or just a plain old control freak when it comes to virtual mix tapes, you're best off with one of these sites or something similar. QCMixtapes uses the excellent SoundCloud as a back-end database to let you upload and share lengthy mixes as single files so you keep total control over the flow. There's a great selection of mixes from the community there for browsing (including by genre), and you can share mixes with specific friends by sending them a URL. Mixcloud offers a similar concept, although we prefer the QCMixtapes interface. The only downside with these options, which offer more freedom and control than anything else on this list, is that you have to handcraft your mixes the same way people did back in the cassette days -- which is either a good or a bad thing, depending on your point of view.
2. 8tracks.com: Essentially a lawyer-approved version of Muxtape, 8tracks offers surprising flexibility with mixes of eight songs or more (updated; also, the name has nothing to do with the plastic cartridges of yore). The site complies with webcaster licensing rules that bar users from adding more than two songs from the same artist, mentioning more than three artists in the title of a mix, mislabeling tracks and so on. The company pays a percentage of expenses, so long as it enforces mild programming rules and doesn't make above $1.25 million in a year (updated, see below). Users, however, need only worry about which songs to include in their mixes so long as they follow those simple rules (if not, the site will remove your mix from the site until you edit it). 8tracks recently added a smart queuing feature that starts a similar-sounding mix when the one you're listening to ends, as well as a widget that lets you post your mix directly to your Facebook feed.
3. Playlist (formerly Project Playlist): No stranger to legal wrangling, Playlist fought off a lawsuit from EMI, which now licenses the service, but is still working on inking deals with other copyright holders. Don't let that faze you; the site has a large catalog of music from sites all over the web, all of which you can add to your shareable, embeddable playlist with a single click. Unlike other sites that use this approach, Playlist manages smooth playback and avoids dead tracks by caching songs on its servers. Bonus: You can turn any of your playlists into a Group Playlist that any of your friends can edit.
4. Opentape: Do you still actually have your own website? Good for you. The rest of us socially networked types with no domains of our own are just being lazy. OpenTape lets you upload a bunch of MP3s to your server using a web tool or FTP and present them in a user-friendly, Muxtape-like interface that lets you reorder, rename, customize and share your mix using your own server. This open source software was developed in direct response to the closure of MuxTape and borrows a piece of that site's publicly available code for rearranging songs in the mix. And although Opentape lives on your server, it lets you embed playable mixtape widgets anywhere HTML is used. The freedom is nice, but the legal ramifications are all yours with this service.
5. Imeem: This ad-supported social media site is not exactly a secret. By now, you've no doubt heard that it contains free, full-length versions of millions of songs you can listen to in their entirety as many times as you want. But Imeem's playlist feature is quite powerful too. One caveat: If you want your friends to be able to hear the full versions, send them to the playlist's URL on the site. If you embed it somewhere else on the web, some of the songs turn into 30-second samples. In order to listen, your friends will have to have or create an Imeem account, but that's a small price to pay for access to your handcrafted masterpiece.
6. Lala: This music service was (re)designed to help you move your music collection into the cloud and let you buy streaming songs for a fraction of what they cost in iTunes. But its playlist-sharing feature is also worthwhile -- the site has a legal catalog of around 8.5 million songs, which you can arrange into mixes of any length. There's one big drawback: Your friends will only be able to listen to each song once for free before paying for them. If they want to hear the playlist again, they'll have to pay 10 cents a song in Lala credits. Bonus: Lala recognizes playlists you've created in iTunes, so there's no need to recreate them online.
7. Grooveshark: Another veteran of a major label lawsuit, the latest version of Grooveshark (to be unveiled later this week) is an improved design created with listening, rather than playlist-sharing, in mind. The site relies entirely on user uploads and responds to copyright-holder complaints by removing content, so you can't always find what you're looking for. But the service is now licensed by EMI, and it's working on signing the other three majors. It includes a healthy selection of playlist-sharing options: e-mail options, embed codes and hooks for Facebook, Twitter and StumbleUpon.
8. Mixtape.me: Much like the Europe-only Spotify, Mixtape.me is a streaming-music application that closely resembles iTunes and other software designed for local music playback. The powerful playlist-creation engine lets you search for tracks, or link to an MP3 somewhere online if what you're looking for isn't already in the catalog (and there are plenty of holes; most files come from the Skreemr MP3 search engine). Extra features include a "quick playlist" feature for sharing a playlist without creating an account, drag-and-drop functionality that works anywhere on the site to add songs to a playlist and comment-enabled playlist liner notes that include artist biographies from Last.fm, lyrics from LyricWiki and videos from YouTube. Share playlists through your profile, URL, embed code or Twitter, directly from the site.
What did we miss? Add your suggestions to the comments section; we'll circle back with a voting-enabled version of this story featuring your suggestions.
Honorable mentions:
ArtoftheMix: This one includes a selection of excellent mixes you can't listen to.
Blentwell: One of many blogs that links to DJ mixes, Blentwell includes a wide range of electronic and dance genres.
ffffoundtape: The catalog on this site depends on users adding URLs. It's still useful for cobbling together playlists from MP3 blogs -- just copy the songs' URLs and add them to ffffoundtape to construct your mix.
Hypetape: We like nearly everything about HypeTape, including the Muxtape-like interface. But it uses blogs for its catalog, so you run into plenty of songs that won't play, and the only way to search is by artist.
MixTapeCollective: You'll find great stuff here. As with ArtoftheMix above, none of the mixes are playable, so you're on your own when it comes to tracking down the songs.
MakeMyMixTape: This site lets you create a quick mix using only the name of a genre -- a novel approach, but it has yet to launch.
Mixa: This clever site takes the "virtual mix tape" thing literally, by offering a USB stick shaped like a cassette that you can hand-label before giving it to that cute girl from English class who never answers your texts.
Muxtape: After its relaunch, you can still use Muxtape to create online mixes -- but only if you're an artist or label with full copyright control over the songs you're uploading.
Spotify: This much-loved freemium music app, which allows playlist sharing and collaboration using a simple URL, is still only available in Europe.
R.I.P.:
Enjoy the above services while you can; by next year, some of them may have joined the following mix-sharing sites in oblivion.
Muxtape (the original version)
See Also:
- Muxtape Keeps The Mixtape Concept Alive
- MixTape.me Strikes a Chord With Music Junkies
- Life After Muxtape: Where Do We Go Now?
- Webcasting Royalties: A Modest Proposal
- Muxtape Returns as a White-Label MySpace
- RIAA Issues Knock Muxtape Offline
- Interview: Justin Ouellette, The Man Behind Muxtape
- MuxFind Lets You Search and Discover on Muxtape
