Sustaining a creative spell on a daily business for a long period needs fuel. I’m a terribly boring guy, and I don’t really believe in doing drugs. I stop drinking coffee after lunch time and only use energy drinks if I need a kick before playing football and I’m too exhausted to walk to my car when I’m playing (and to mix with vodka).

My cheat is music. I love it. It is the only way I can survive cardio at the gym, my means of concentration at the office and my fuel at night.

My biggest problem with music, though, is that unless I have time to research new bands I usually end up stuck in a rut. I’m subscribed to Last.FM and use it primarily for one channel – the “Sounds like Neil Young” channel. I’ve tried many others, but nothing comes close to satisfying me as much, even when I tried to specify what I would consider to be a very narrow range of music.

The solution: 8tracks.com. It is all-legit, free-to-use and, as their blurb states: handcrafted. The concept is incredibly simple, users just create small musical mixes and tag them by genre. The average seems to be 8 tracks (hence the name of the site), but some mixes are much longer. I haven’t found the time to create mixes myself, so I might revisit the subject once I have.

You don’t even need to subscribe to enjoy the music, even though creating an account does have its advantages. It allows you to create your own mixes, add songs to your favourites, add mixes to your favourites subscribe to other users’ mixes.

Another mega bonus is the availability of apps for Android and on iDevices. You can select a mix on the move and you’re on the way to musical discovery.

8tracks does have drawbacks (or rather, limitations). It does not compete with Spotify, Google music or Grooveshark because you cannot choose your own tracks (unless you create your own mixes). I have also never come across a mix with more than one song per artist, so I’m also guessing there’s a limit imposed there. I also find it frustrating that you can only press next for a limited number of times per hour – they say it is because of the way their license to play music works.

But I have found nothing I’ve tried so far even comes close as a service to discover new music. Since all the mixes are made manually it can be a bit of a hit-and-miss at times, but overall when you select a mix based on its tags the hit-rate is very high. Try it out, you surely won’t be disappointed and you have absolutely nothing to lose.

(#25 of 366 X 2012 project)