Bring back the MixTape!

Posted by on Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Recently, it seems that quite a few teachers want to have their students use popular music for class assignments. In the past, students would create a "mixtape" on an analog cassette (back in the day) or, more recently, they would burn a CD of songs, which would leave the teacher with a stack of media that might never be used again. What a waste.

More recently, the challenge that teachers and tech staff encounter is that either students want to take tracks from their iPods or CDs and put them on the Web. Obviously, this is fraught with all kinds of technological and copyright-related issues. Well, here's a possible solution, as described in depth by Wired magazine.

MixTape.me is a website that acts like an online version of iTunes, without the need to purchase anything. Students (and teachers) can search for many popular songs and then create their own playlist(s) to share with others. Below is an example, which I was able to create and embed in this blog in under 5 minutes. Think then of the possibilities: students could create a custom playlist and then add their own comments, as well as pictures to the "jukebox". HINT: just double-click on a song title to play the music!




2 Comments

Marc G. said...

How is this possible?! I just created an account and it's amazing. Is there some copyright loophole I'm missing here? I would think that the music industry would be up in arms about this web site?

S. Bolos said...

Well, so far so good. Here's a quote from Wired about the copyright issue:

"You can't upload tracks from your computer and share them — that's the biggest difference between MixTape.me and MuxTape — but we had no trouble finding all but the most obscure artists in the site's search tool. The service pulls files from around the web. Quite a few come from SeeqPod (which has been a record label target, but so far remains functional). The rest come from other public sources like blogs, labels and artist pages."

Thanks for stopping by, Marc!

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