Ever since Soundcloud started bringing DJ mixes down for copyright violations, often without actual complaints by the labels or artists included in the mixes, I’d been actively looking for another way to deliver mixes to the public. Dropbox is handy for disseminating downloadable mixes to close friends, but is impractical for a mass delivery system. Other sites I checked out had cumbersome and annoying GUIs or absurd price tags for their service. I shopped around to some web hosting companies to find out their media hosting policies, and in general could not guarantee that mixes wouldn’t get pulled for bandwidth or data storage TOS violations. Plus, none of the options had easily accessible information on who’s listening to your mixes. It was frustrating!
Then, my friend Jordan over at //disculture// turned me on to Mixcloud. As it stands right now, Mixcloud is geared specifically towards DJs, is free, has no restrictions on how much you upload or how long your mixes are, allows you to timestamp what songs you’re playing at what point in the mix, and avoids pesky licensing squabbles by restricting mixes to streaming only. While it would be nice to give people a way to download mixes, let’s face it: the only place people generally listen to DJ mixes, in my experience, is at work, where they can put them on in the background and do something else. Thus, streaming works fine in my opinion. My verdict so far: I love it and will be using it for all future mix storage, provided their TOS doesn’t turn into something reprehensible.
Tangentially, I also made a solemn oath that if my Facebook fan page hit 300 fans by the end of this week, I would record and upload a monster EBM mix spanning the history of the genre as a fun gift to my adoring fanbase (
). That goal was reached by Tuesday afternoon, so now I guess I’m stuck doing it! I’ll be recording that this weekend and I intend for it to be a live recorded mix, at least two hours long. Good thing nothing is going on this weekend, huh?
Finally, my profile on Mixcloud is here: http://www.mixcloud.com/djpathogen. You can find everything I record, whether it be home studio mixes, radio shows, mixes from giveaway CDs or drunken, fucked up recordings from club appearances all right there. Thanks for checking it out!
