One of the articles pointed to Muxtape Stumbler, a great service for finding new music – it searches for other user’s mixtapes based on bands, albums or songs. It’s a service similar to Pandora’s (but that’s no longer avaliable outside the US).

Favtape offer a similar service, but without the need to upload songs individually. Instead, you enter your Last.fm (or Pandora) username, and the site creates the mixtape for you automatically. It’s based on songs you’ve marked as your favourite, top played, or recent plays on Last.fm. It’s extremely easy to use – I set up and am now listening to a mixtape in the last 45 seconds (having never been on the site before!).  If you fancy a bit of nostalgia you should check out their top songs by year section – some great (and really brutal!) music from over the years in there.

Muxtape also offers a link from each song to purchase the mp3 from Amazon. I assume they’re using Amazon’s affiliate program – an great way of making money from this type of service. Favtape offer links to iTunes, Amazon and Flycell (for ringtones), again, a great idea for making money through a service which is based on data which they don’t hold and didn’t create.

The user interfaces on both these services are clean and very easy to use – both have embraced minimal design principles that mean no unnecessary functionality is included.  By doing this, the designers have provided interfaces that are uncluttered, and let the user focus on what they are trying to do…listen to their music. This is in contrast to the newly redesigned Last.fm which has lots of functionality hidden in different areas. Something that both distracts user attention, and make using the site more difficult to use than the previous version. A quick look at the user forums of Last.fm will tell you pretty quickly that the user base isn’t overly impressed with the new look…

Related articles

• Three Hot Mixtape Services That Are Remaking the Art Form
• Are mix tape sites on solid legal ground?
• Favtape Creates Mixtapes from Your Pandora and Last.fm Accounts
• FavTape: Playlists Don’t Get Any Faster Than This
• Favtape: Full Playback For Your Favorite Last.fm And Pandora Songs

There have been a number of articles published about this:

• Eircom may face music in illegal files row (Irish Independent)
• Big four record labels sue Eircom (Silicon Republic)
• The Record Companies vs The ISP – in Ireland! (Lex Ferenda)
• IRMA v. Eircom – Why ISP filtering for the music industry is a bad idea (Digital Rights Ireland)

It should be interesting to see what happens to the cost of broadband in the country if the record companies succeed in their action…