But that raises another question. As it happens, CDM community member FauxAudio was just asking about hosting music files on our forums:

online audio host – reccomendations?

So far, in the running:

• Amazon S3 (and as I noted, Yahoo just opened up their player tool)
• musicane.com (also sells albums)
• payloadz.com (ditto)
• Twango, which also hosts video and still images but supports an embeddable audio player (thank you, Nokia)

Interestingly, Amazon S3 seems to be the current favorite.

What would you want from a music host? I guess that’s the first question. Other experiences / preferences?

Data center photo: skreuzer, via Flickr.

Effective May 1, 2007, mixdepot.net will be shutting down. I’ve suspended billing so there won’t be a charge for the final month of service.

Thanks for your support, and I wish you the best of luck in all your DJ pursuits!

In case you haven’t heard of the service, here’s an explanation from the about page:

MixDepot.net was created in early 2005 to solve a problem frequently encountered by electronic music artists and DJs on the Internet. These artists host large files and would like to offer them to as many people as possible. With a traditional web hosting service, they may have plenty of disk space, but eat through their monthly bandwidth allocation within several days. They are then forced to purchase more bandwidth or jump to another host to keep their mixes available.

At MixDepot.net, download bandwidth is unmetered and we only charge our artists for disk space. We also provide automatic BitTorrent support during the first several days when a mix is the most popular to allow the greatest number of people to download the file.

Web services often don’t have the longest shelf life, but it’s still said when things go away. Of course, this brings me to my next question: where you like to host your files?