A rare, short-lived music medium, an 8-track is essentially a legend to my generation. At least I am aware of them enough to get the irony of using the name for this music-sharing site.
8tracks.com let’s us make ‘mixtapes’ to share publicly. Folks can comment on whether they like your tune-juxtaposing style. I think it’s a neat addition to anyone’s personal online journal. I mean blog.
However, flipping the keener–critic coin, there is a downside to this seemingly fun website. Turns out you can’t preview the list of tracks on a mixtape, nor can you skip through tracks. I guess this is how the site justifies playing music for free: If you skip a track, that artist isn’t getting the exposure they’ve agreed to receive from 8tracks.
Thus hitting the fast-forward button more than three times will result in your aural ADD getting smacked with a polite box requesting patience: “Apologies for the inconvenience, but our music license requires us to limit the number of tracks you may skip each hour.”
Boo.