Meatmachine.info

In the earliest instance I can remember I was maybe thirteen years old. My brother and I were at my dad’s apartment in New Jersey, glued to a computer monitor as per usual, downloading music on Napster. In the years since, I’ve never really considered myself much of a CD collector. I listen to music on my computer, and that’s how I like it.

I’ve been a member of Last.fm for over a year now, having the music I listen to on my computer automatically “scrobbled” and cataloged. Their benign data-mining makes answering the question “what kind of music do you listen to?” a fair bit easier, and allows me to see what my (participating) friends are listening to. Having confidence that we share tastes, this can be good way to find new music to investigate.

As a social network they offer messaging and the ability to post on your friend’s “shoutbox”, but this is pretty redundant and useless to someone who already has a relatively functional friends-list on another social network. Their tagging, loved-it, favorites, playlists, features? Whatever, I don’t even care what these do.

At the other end of the spectrum lies Muxtape, which is a very different kind of service. As described by the developer Justin,

Muxtape is a service for creating mixtapes.

You upload up to 12 .mp3’s which anyone can then stream them from your muxtape.com sub-domain. Look at mine for a simple demonstration, jonodavis.muxtape.com.

Dead simple to use, Muxtape doesn’t suffer from the glut of features found on Last.fm. The few additional features that are present, like customizable header color, favorites, and RSS feeds, don’t get in the way of the uncomplicated design.

Cheers to elegant, inexpensive, and DIY methods for web music distribution.