Quandary time. As you can see I have a big cascade of Letsmix all down the right of my blog. It is coming up for subscription renewal time and I just don't get the feeling that Letsmix are going set the world alight in the media streaming world. Wonderful 192kbps stream, excellent music playing application... yet, I feel like that's IT.
I'm paying for Premium, I'm getting to store a load of mixes in the cloud but the mix advertising is quite poor. The community is full of people slapping up mixes with the SAME tracks in it, spamming your wall with "5* rating for me pls!" comments, and that is pretty much sucky as far as footfall goes. My mixes tend to romp in at 80 minute journeys, I'm getting about 10 minutes of play on average. That is 2 - 3 tracks maximum. Everyone is there to push, but not to listen. Letsmix is feeling... static.
I have an inkling that Mixcloud is going to be major force in media streaming. I remember being part of a German run social networking site called uBoot. Profiles, walls, photos ... all the ingredients of Facebook success, but have you heard of it? No. It just never took off. The aesthetic similarity to Letsmix's site is rather frightening too.
Just scanning through the homepage of Mixcloud, you can see all the big names of the industry having a presence. The community looks vibrant, people joining just to listen to music and talk about music, and not just to push it. Mixcloud is feeling... exciting!
The grape on the grapevine is that my major bugbear, the 100mb file limit per cloudcast, is going to be upped. If this happens along with a streaming app for smartphones, then consider Letsmix abandoned. Their iPhone app screams missed opportunity to me.
So to celebrate my investigations in the world of Mixcloud, an old classic of mine now supplied via Mixcloud. Should be sufficiently summery for our recent climate.
