Strictly commercial

For years (like, thirty; I started in 1972) I made mix tapes, and lots of them; when it became possible to make mix CDs, I started burning my own discs and documenting them on the Web. Of course, I wouldn't duplicate them for the general public, because (1) I have extremely weird musical tastes and (2) there are an awful lot of lawyers out there just waiting for the opportunity to jump.

Then (as in this month) came something called Mixaloo, which enables you to produce a downloadable mix from the tracks they're allowed to distribute, which others can actually buy via a Web widget. Hence, the Wendex Quality Assortment, fifteen tunes ranging from Del Shannon to the Deftones, which you could buy separately from some other download service for $14.85 or so, or which you can get complete from Mixaloo for, well, $14.85. (Assuming they operate on a licensing model similar to Apple's, I figure they're paying around $9-10 to the record labels; I get $2.05 out of what's left.) The widget, which comes in three flavors, is actually pretty slick, and it allows a 30-second sample of each track before you commit yourself. I'm looking upon this as an experiment rather than as a source of income, for reasons which should be obvious. (Downside: This uses Microsoft's Windows Media Player 9 and up, and presumably Microsoft's DRM.)

Update, 9:15 pm: To continue the experiment, I bought these eleven tracks for $10.89. The download manager (which presumes IE, dammit) can grab four tracks at once; the whole transaction took less than ten minutes. The actual tracks are DRMed WMAs encoded at 192, which sounded pretty good.

Posted at 3:44 PM to Fileophile