Ok. MuxTape kicks ass. It’s a dead-simple interface, nothing to figure out. You upload 12 songs, and that’s your “mix tape”. Songs are listed in big blocky format. Click and listen. So simple that it was harder for me to describe than for you to go listen.
So I won’t describe its functions, but rather why it’s so damn great.
1) “Gimme a cheeze wit nuthin” .. “Nuthin??” - In such a simple interface, he (Justin, the guy behind muxtape) has managed to irrevocably separate love & sharing of music, from selling & promoting. There’s no way of contacting the person (author? mixtaper?) who created a certain mixtape. The closest to being “marketed to” on the site is when I was listening to one guy’s 12 mashups…well, I have to assume he made them… I googled his long, odd account name, and found some other stuff online about him. But pretty subdued.
I don’t mean to knock “the music industry” - in fact, I think this guy justin could have each song link to Itunes to let people buy songs if they want to - and I’m not knocking the commerce side of music. It’s just that I’ve grown so so so used to love of music and sales/promotion of music to be joined at the hip, that there’s something…relieving to not be able to buy anything on this site.
2) Blind Taste Test - Ok, what else. I like that there’s no voting. No comments. No friends. No networking. Just click on a random colored box, and listen. Your opinion of the music can be influenced by nothing except the music itself. What else do you have to go on? nada.
3) Only The Best - I like that you’re limited to 12 songs. In the same way that the entire interface is elegantly simple, so is the musical philosophy a sparse one (please upload 12 songs) rather than “please upload your ENTIRE 200 GB” - Of course an assumed benefit of only 12 songs is that you’ll choose them very carefully, making the quality of the site’s music OVERALL being extremely high. I’m hearing lots of good stuff here yo.
4) You Can’t Categorize Me! - I like that there’s no genre, category, vertical, horizontal, sounds like, etc, etc, etc. This is similar to what I wrote in #2, but I think it’s worth its own item in this list. Here’s my approach to music: I like good music. Across all “genres” and “categories” - Any genre has its great, and it’s crap. Yes, there are people who only like trance, or heavy metal, etc. But most people I know, when asked “what kind of music do you like?” can’t answer, because their collection spans the gamut. (gamet? gamit?).
Categories help people to more efficiently purchase music. When my friend says “hey you gotta listen to this song” I don’t first ask him what genre it is. It’s not a prerequisite. What I care about is that he chose this song, of all other songs, to claim as “good”. So that’s worth my time.
Same goes for muxtape. If you took the time to upload 12 songs, for absolutely no potential benefit to yourself in any way, then I believe you really think these 12 songs are worth listening to. Damn, every single muxtape I listen to is great. And spanning “genres”
5) Runs On Amazon Elastic Cloud - This last bit of fascination has nothing to do with music. It’s all about hosting. Apparently, he’s using Amazon’s Web Services which means that he only pays for the amount of disk space (and bandwidth) that he uses. Now, I have no idea what his costs are, but the point is, muxtape will literally never run out of server space, beacuse Amazon’s EC2 gives you ever-expanding hosting space (cost per usage, of course).
Ok, that’s it. Go make a muxtape. Oh, and go listen to My Muxtape. Or Hal’s Muxtape
Update 4/16/08: Since I wrote this, muxtape has added a couple of improvements.
1) When you’re logged in, if you like a certain muxtape, you can add it to your favorites. But, in keeping with ‘muxtape tradition’ you can only have 12 favorites 
2) Every song now has a “buy from Amazon” which, incidentally, I’ve never used. Amazon MP3 Downloader is pretty cool… can move your mp3’s directly to Itunes.
