http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/02/25/imeem-blocked-from-myspace/

Apparently there was a time when you couldn’t even mention the phrase ‘imeem.com’ on myspace without it being censored. Of course we all know that this hostility was because myspace was planning on launching myspace music and didn’t want to help a competitor lock up the market.

There are official Facebook and Myspace applications from all those sites, as well as generic web embed capability which between them is hugely popular.
Taking imeem and projectplaylist together they’ve got 120million uniques – thats more people than use facebook.
http://www.quantcast.com/p-e059sb-sW00wM
http://www.quantcast.com/p-03Kgz0RV6Ztmc

imeem has also launched its on API so in theory, building a clone of muxtape could be done on top of imeem’s api with almost no work.

Great comments and perspective. I’d never heard of imeem.com but I look forward to playing with it.

Now, assuming this has been done before, it makes me even more curious about why an app wasn’t developed for Facebook or MySpace that accomplished a similar goal. If it is as simple as Stoff suggests, why wasn’t it done already by one of those two platforms? Any thoughts?

The real question should be, why muxtape has captured the imagination of the blogosphere, while none of the others have.

If you look at the number of blog posts discussing muxtape vs imeem you’ll see a similar number, but imeem has over 100 times as many users.

On the quesiton of legality, the general consensus is that muxtape has not resolved any legal issues. What will most likely happen is that if they get popular enough they will get sued and forced to make changes to the site – pay for licenses, filter out unlicensed tunes etc etc.

imeem has already dealt with the legal issues in a similar manner.

“Muxtape is directly affiliated with Amazon’s mp3 download system as their monetization source”

This is completely wrong. Any yahoo can put a link to amazon mp3 store. It doesn’t mean they’ve cleared any rights.

“There are aspects of Muxtape, specifically its flash design, high bandwidth requirements, and open sharing architecture, that make it impossible to deploy on either Facebook or MySpace. But hey, maybe someone will come up with a link to the platform.”

Muxtape isn’t flash. It just uses a flash player to play mp3s. In fact the interface is entirely html/css.

Open sharing architecture? Huh? It is a playlist with a subdomain.

High bandwidth requirements? S3 handles all of this.

Muxtape is a wonderfully simple tool to share playlists but lets not beat around the bush, it is SIMPLE. The app can be made by a junior rails programmer in a week. It’s the inventiveness of the design that is the cool part.

Good points both. Just to clarify what I was thinking about in my blog post:

First, Muxtape is directly affiliated with Amazon’s mp3 download system as their monetization source, so I think they’ve resolved the legal issues. Also, note that MySpace distributes considerable amounts of free music in a similar format to Muxtape, in that you can listen to a song, but to download it you need to pay money.

Second, you are right that both MySpace and Facebook are platforms; in fact I’d say they are both terrific platforms. However, just because something is a platform does not make it universally easy to develop an app. There are aspects of Muxtape, specifically its flash design, high bandwidth requirements, and open sharing architecture, that make it impossible to deploy on either Facebook or MySpace. But hey, maybe someone will come up with an innovation that is friendly to both.

I haven’t played with Grooveshark, but it was another application that I saw during the research for this blog post. It doesn’t seem to enjoy the same buzz as Muxtape, but then again, here we are discussing it in a blog . I’ll check it out.