Mixaloo: Share Mixtapes and Make Money While Doing It

Poughkeepsie, NY startup Mixaloo wants to make the experience of purchasing music online more social and rewarding, both emotionally and financially.

The company is taking a phenomenon - the mixtape - that has spanned several decades and media formats - 8 tracks, audio cassettes, CDs, and MP3 players - and bringing it to the web.

As a Mixaloo user, you can create playlists of music from all the major record labels, including Warner, Universal, EMI, and Sony. You can then share these playlists with friends via email, or you can embed playlist widgets into your website, blog, personalized homepage, or social networking profile. Mixaloo widgets are powered by Clearspring and can be added to your various online properties with a few clicks of the button (we’ve embedded one below).

To make a mix is free, but your friends will need to pay for the whole mix if they want to hear more than 30-second preview clips. The songs are 99 cents each (good) and protected by Windows Media DRM (very bad). The DRM protection is definitely this service’s biggest downside and could cripple Mixaloo’s potential until the major labels embrace DRM-free music. The company may throw advertisements into the mix at some point to make up for some of the lost revenue (I’ve got to stop it with these puns).

Mixaloo isn’t depending on user sociability to spread their widgets and entice customers to buy music from them. They’re harnessing the power of green by offering to split the profit from each sale 50-50 with mixtape creators. The company estimates that profits are 20-40 cents per track on average, so split that in half to get your per-track profit rate. We should be getting anywhere between $1.30 and $2.60 for each sale of the mix below (buy buy buy!). In addition to earning money that is paid out through PayPal each month, you will collect one point for every track sold. These points can be redeemed at a Mixaloo merchandise store that offers items such as t-shirts, speaker sets, and even cars.

While Mixaloo is currently in private beta, the company has provided us with 1,000 invitations to give our readers. To redeem yours, go here and enter “techcrunch” into the “TechCrunch Code” box.

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Are You Going To The Zune Social? Me Neither.

Poor J Allard. The one cool guy at Microsoft—he’s the one who brought us the original Xbox—is trying so hard with the Zune. But he’s no match for Steve Jobs.

Redmond’s answer to the iPod has been a relative flop so far. The 1.2 million Zunes sold since it launched a year ago amounts to less than three percent of the number of iPods sold during the same time (which is more than 40 million), and only about one percent of the 110 million iPods sold since 2001. So Allard is trying again with a revamped Zune that looks even more like the iPod, and comes in new flash-memory versions. That’s so nano of him. But what, no Zune phone? No sexy iTouch? Allard is still trying to catch up to where Apple was a year ago.

At least he is getting rid of the Zune brown (a color only a UPS delivery man could love). The wireless syncing with your computer sounds nice. And the Zune music store will soon offer one million DRM-free songs—yay! But if you share them with someone else the other person can still only play them three times. That’s Microsoft for you. They put the DRM in “DRM-free” music.

And to try to make the kids care about a second-class device that, well, no one cares about, Allard had his biggest brainstorm yet. The Zune, you see, is not just another MP3 player. It’s a social network! That’s where this whole Zune Social thing comes in. I just hope that this is not Microsoft’s answer to Facebook in case the investment deal doesn’t go through.

Zune Social is a social network for the one percent of the digital music player-owning population that have a Zune or will ever have a Zune so that they can share their playlists and samples of the songs on their Zunes. Hmm. Well, gee, I can already share the playlists of the songs on my iPod with services like Last.fm and Anywhere.fm. Or I can create my own playlists on imeem, where anyone else in the world can go to listen to every song on my playlist in its entirety for free, with the blessings of the music labels to boot. Even Apple is getting into the social music scene with My iTunes widgets that show off the songs you’ve bought. With so many other, more popular options out there in both hardware and online music services, who is going to bother to go to the Zune Social—other than Bill Gates and J Allard?

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Soundpedia: A Decent Pandora Substitute For The Rest Of Us

Soundpedia is a legal Singapore based music sharing community offering a music streaming service that provides a decent Pandora substitute to users outside of the United States who can no longer use Pandora, along with the United States itself.

Soundpedia comes with the usual array of Web 2.0 music sharing functions. The site helps users discover new tunes and share them with friends. Soundpedia supports user playlists both interactively or by uploading existing playlist settings from music players. Users can chat with friends, post testimonials, make a comment on an artist, or make their own audio/ video blog.

In a different time it would be easy to dismiss Soundpedia as being yet another music sharing site entering a crowded marketplace. Yet Soundpedia meets an unmet need; it’s more Pandora than Last.fm and the world outside of the United States has been blocked from Pandora for a couple of months. Soundpedia is different to Last.fm. Sure, Last.fm music recommendations can be enjoyable but at other times you just want to listen to a particular artist or album. Soundpedia delivers with a thorough offering that may not be the most aesthetically pleasing service to use, but delivers with music. Music can be played by genre, artist or album and Soundpedia’s library is extensive. I did find the odd album that wasn’t fully included but instead songs were listed in 30 second clips. Co-Founder and NY native Gregory Gumo tells me that Soundpedia is increasing its playlist regularly; most users won’t notice any deficiency.

As non-American I’m missing Pandora’s functionality; Soundpedia just hit my Google Bookmarks list.

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MusicGiants DRM-free

MusicGiants: WMA Lossless Music, DRM-Free

MusicGiants isn’t the most well-known online music download service out there, but they’ve been pumping out WMA Lossless files since 2005. Until a couple weeks ago, all of the super hi-res files were locked down with Windows Media DRM, but no more! Right now you can only get Paul McCartney’s Memory Almost Full DRM-free in truly bit-for-bit identical quality to a CD, but by this fall, MusicGiants will release lots more titles that you can pirate share at will. (The company hasn’t done an official press release yet, but MusicGiants CEO Scott Bahneman recently spilled the beans to Stereophile.)

It sure makes the iTunes Music Store’s 256Kbps AAC files look pretty wimpy, and it even trumps 7 Digital’s DRM-less 320Kbps MP3s. Will you hear the difference? If you have a super hi-fi audio rig at home then it’s a good bet you will. If you have an iPod, then no, because the iPod can’t hang with any WMA format.

That officially makes MusicGiants’ files the highest-resolution DRM-less downloads around. Which begs the question: When will Steve Jobs let us download Apple Lossless files on the iTMS? Another question: When will more portable players support WMA Lossless?

MusicGiants Floats High-Rez Files without DRM [via Stereophile]