Muxtape Remixed

Sasha Frere-Jones from the New Yorker has posted a recently conducted interview with Muxtape founder Justin Ouellette on his blog. Over the course of the interview, Frere-Jones and Ouellette touch on a number of topics, but my interest was piqued by the description of the intended new direction for the site, which seems to move it into competition with MySpace and Facebook, among many others, while at the same time re-positioning the “build your own mixtape” aspect as more of a gimmick than anything else.

The new Muxtape will allow artists to sign up, have a profile and upload their music. In so doing, they make it available for non-artists to incorporate into their mixtapes, the heart of what made Muxtape so special in the first place. The difference now is that music choices will be limited to the selection made available by the site itself, rather than being completely in the hands of the user. The reasons for this change are absolutely clear and the fact is that the original Muxtape, like so many good web-based music startups, could not continue to exist because of a distinct lack of imagination in legal departments and the upper echelons of the music industry. However, by restricting the user experience in this way, I am not sure that the Muxtape 2.0 will be able to capture the hearts and minds of music and tech aficionados in the same way Muxtape 1.0 did.

What do you guys think? Will the joy of sharing and discovering new music be preserved with this new iteration? Or will the new limitations on selection and personalization take away the appeal?

We conducted our own interview with Justin Ouellette back in November of last year. Check it out.