Pandora, Last.fm, iTunes...Favtape?

I've been a longtime user of Pandora, and love the ease with which I can discover new artists that correlate directly with my favorites. And of course, iTunes is great as it allows us to download our favorite music and listen to it at random, or within specific personally designed playlists from any location in the world via portable Mp3 players.

The downsides to both however is that you can't control the order of songs streamed on Pandora, and it costs 99 cents per download from iTunes' catalogue, forcing your friends to pay for the music if you want to digitally share a particularly intriguing playlist. These frustrations started me on a quest to find an application that offers the best of both worlds, and Favtape.com was the last stop on my cyber tour. Check out this article from TechCrunch for a full explanation of this "mix-tape sharing" service, which, from the outset, could perhaps be flawless and devoid of the licensing issues that plagued Muxtape, Favtape's predecessor and initial model for future mix-tape creation and playlist sharing applications?

However, it still remains to be seen whether Favtape's reliance on Seeqpod's indexing capabilities will be its ultimate downfall. Keep in mind that even though you can pull as many songs as you want from the Seeqpod index, at no point are you able to archive these songs on your machine's hard drive, or claim them as your own. They are housed and can be accessed only through favtape's website. What do you think...is this truly Muxtape on steroids...or just another Napster type phenomenon doomed for failure?

-GB