Stolen Mix Tape

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Stolen Mix Tape is an independently-owned portal and directory for independent musicians and related industry persons from the United States and Canada. It features venue and musician listings, related resources, a show calendar, photos, videos and free MP3 downloads. Stolen Mix Tape began in February 2003, and relaunched with a completely new design and CMS in September 2005.

A download store opened in January 2007. Musicians can upload up to 50 songs and control the download or purchase settings for each song. Songs currently cost $.89 each. Album prices are set by each musician. The Stolen Mix Tape download store is notable because it does not apply DRM to songs and uses PayPal.

Related industry persons are booking agents, record label and venue representatives, sound and recording engineers, photographers, web and graphic designers, and promoters. These types are people are usually left out on musician-centered websites.

Contents

[edit] How it works

Stolen Mix Tape works very similarly to PureVolume and MySpace. Musicians and industry persons register a user profile, and in turn can submit and manage an unlimited amount of resource (record label, production, promotion company) profiles and musician profiles. MySpace and PureVolume, however, both require a separate account for each kind of profile one wants to create.

What makes Stolen Mix Tape different from the above mentioned sites is its non-corporate feel, transparency from the administrators, and individual attention given to certain musicians.

[edit] Benefits to musicians

Musicians can benefit from Stolen Mix Tape in a number of ways.

  • Musicians who upload songs have an embeddable Flash MP3 player. Website visitors can also get the code to this Flash music player, which can be embedded on MySpace profiles or personal websites.
  • Shows at venues listed on Upcoming.org and are added to Stolen Mix Tape are automatically submitted to Upcoming.org and given a unique event page on Upcoming.org.
  • Musicians can sell their songs at low prices, and with no hassle.

[edit] Benefits to industry persons

  • Booking agents, show promoters, record label and venue representatives are able to submit shows to Stolen Mix Tape (and subsequently to Upcoming.org) as well.
  • People who do business with musicians can manage a resource profile to advertise and promote their services and wares.
  • Record label representatives and band managers can administer all of the profiles of musicians they represent.

[edit] Unique features

Stolen Mix Tape has many unique features; these features would be considered elements of a Web 2.0 website or service.

  • Blog/RSS feed integration - Musician blogs are checked each hour for feed updates. New entries are cached into a local database and presented on the site. The entire database is searchable. Uses Magpie RSS.
  • Flickr integration - Photos added to the Stolen Mix Tape Flickr group and tagged with the appropriate tags are displayed on the musician and venue profile pages. Uses Flickr API.
  • Upcoming.org integration - Venues listed simultaneously on Stolen Mix Tape and Upcoming.org are linked. Events from Upcoming.org are displayed on the Stolen Mix Tape venue profiles. Uses Upcoming.org API.
  • YouTube integration - Musicians who maintain YouTube accounts to which they upload music and performance videos can have these listed in their Stolen Mix Tape musician profile; these videos are played on Stolen Mix Tape pages. Uses YouTube API.
  • Facebook integration - With the help of Facebook's Share feature, Stolen Mix Tape musicians in addition to their videos can be easily shared to friends on Facebook. An image, an excerpt and a link are populated into the Facebook Share pop-up window.
  • Caturday integration - lots of pictures of hilarious cats.
  • Google Maps integration - Google Maps appear on each venue's profile page. Maps also points on the map which represent nearby venues. Clicking on these points brings up the standard GMaps popup window with that venue's info and a link to that venue's profile page.

[edit] History

Stolen Mix Tape started in February 2003, and is the reincarnation of SteveVance.NET, the Fox Valley Teen online community. In February 2003, only musicians from six states in the Midwest were able to join. The point of this was to keep the site exclusive to these states and to pay more attention to those musicians.

SteveVance.NET was started in 2001 by Illinois resident Steven Vance to provide Fox Valley-based bands a place to list shows, so that he could attend them.

More Midwest states were slowly added, until December 2006 when musicians from all 50 United States and the 10 provinces and 3 territories of Canada were allowed to manage musician profiles.

The name "Stolen Mix Tape" comes from Megan W. of Illinois. "Stolen Mix Tape" was one of her LiveJournal usernames.

[edit] Notable musicians

[edit] Related websites

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