Hypetape: new playlist site
May 12, 2009
Hypetape describes itself, somewhat redundantly, as ‘the illegitimate lovechild of The Hype Machine and Muxtape.’ It scrapes the web for MP3s, and lets you put together playlists, which you can save and share. They don’t host any of the music (so they aren’t vulnerable to filesharing charges). It’s a neat idea, with a straightforward interface, but there’s one major problem: music posted to blogs is almost always ephemeral, whether by choice or necessity. That means that the life expectancy of your playlists is shorter than a snowball in a supernova. I did a test search on British Sea Power and I think that the resultant songs were ordered chronologically (“Come Wander With Me” was at the top), but it would be useful to see a posting date, so you’d at least have a sense of when the best-by date would be. What would make this a really compelling application, as far as I’m concerned, is if I could use Hypetape to pull together a mixtape, and then for it to automagically find and download the MP3s, and have them appear as a labeled playlist in iTunes. Ideally, it’d be coupled with a good music exploration or recommendation system, to make it easy to find artists that I didn’t already know about (if anyone is listening, I would also like a pony).
What do you think? What would you want to see in a playlist site?
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zed equals zee 
Yeah, this seems like a good idea. And it kinda is. Muxtape was super simple in terms of design and functionality but it didn’t need to be any more than it was. The creators knew that. But Hypetape looks like it’s trying to copy Muxtape’s style, even though it’s using a more complicated way to create a playlist. There at least needs to be more information regarding the individual songs. Maybe a link to the page the song came from. And more results. It looks like you only get a max of 20 for every search. But hey. I still think it’s better than the new Muxtape.