Oh well, best make that 199 digital music startups in 2008. Mixwit, the site which allowed users to create online mixtapes and - crucially - made them look pretty, has announced it will shut down before the end of the year.
The news was posted on the site’s blog on December 10th, but perhaps the news didn’t circulate effectively, because now the site’s creators have mailed the blog post to users. They remark:
We’ve put a year of work into Mixwit so this choice wasn’t taken lightly. I won’t go into the details of our situation but state simply that we boldly marched into in a position best described as “between a rock and a hard place.”

So basically it looks like The Man got to them, rather like he did Muxtape.
What I find interesting is the fact that Mixwit pulled its tracks from two MP3 search engines which scrape MP3 blogs the world over - Skreemr and SeeqPod - and these sites remain active. Surely if there’s a bad guy in this scenario, it’s those sites? Or, of course, the blogs that post the tracks in the first place?
Mixwit just allowed people to collate and prettify collections of songs that came via those sources, so if they have been threatened with legal ramifications it suggests an approach from the authorities akin to punishing the user rather than the dealer.
Anyway, cheerio Mixwit - I enjoyed playing with you. For those of you looking for something else to play with I’d go back and check out that list of 200 sites I mentioned - or this blog recommends Opentape as a possible replacement.

Posted by Stuart Waterman on Thursday December 18th, 2008 at 10:10 am