Remember last month when we made a hand-wringing post about the death of the MP3 and thereby the end of the downloadable Monthly Mix? Well, fuck it — ZIP FILE BACK. Thank you for your comments and opinions! This is blog-in-action. But, we know some of you enjoyed the ease and increased songchoice represented by our Spotify playlist, and so guess what SPOTIFY BACK too. And we ALSO realize some of you can’t/won’t access Spotify but also want to see a playlist that isn’t limited just to MP3s because that can be arbitrarily restrictive with respect to the pool our mixes draw from, so now we are going SOUNDCLOUD PLAYLIST ALSO, for the first time. We are trying. For you.

Here’s how it works: The downloadable 16-track monthly mix is below, with a clickable tracklist; many of those songs are too new/obscure for Spotify, so whatever is available is on this month’s Spotify Monthly Mix (embedded below, subscribable here) along with some songs that are available on Spotify but not MP3 (like the new Active Child cut); and finally, there is a Soundcloud set which is the most inclusive item of all, featuring almost everything from the ZIP while also including some of the great straight-to-Soundcloud gems from this month like Smith Westerns, TEEN, Drake, James Blake, etc. YOU HAVE OPTIONS:

One more note: The zip file tracklist is below in clickable form as always. Since you can just scroll through the Spotify and Soundcloud widgets for those tracklists, you’ll find an unordered link-list of songs that appear in either (or both) of those playlists, in case you’d like to know more about those songs, or read our original thoughts on what made those songs worthy of inclusion in the first place, or in case you just enjoy clicking out of love for the game. Bases are covered here — hope you guys find something that works for you. Manja:

Stereogum Monthly Mix: March 2013 (Pt.1) (.zip, 64MB)
Stereogum Monthly Mix: March 2013 (Pt.2) (.zip, 64.4MB)

ZIP TRACKLIST
01 Dinosaur Jr – “Entertainment” (Phoenix Cover)
02 Majical Cloudz – “Childhood’s End”
03 Shlomo & Jeremih – “Bo Peep (Do U Right)”
04 Junip – “Your Life, Your Call”
05 Glass Candy – “The Possessed (Extended Runway Edit)”
06 Fol Chen – “IOU”
07 Fat Tony – “Hood Party” (Feat. Kool A.D. & Despot)
08 Big K.R.I.T. – “Shine On (Feat. Bun B)”
09 Hudson Mohawke – “Pleasure”
10 Kurt Vile – “Never Run Away”
11 Thee Oh Sees – “Toe Cutter Thumb Buster”
12 Colleen Green – “Heavy Shit”
13 Sinkane – “Warm Spell (Barker & Baumecker Remix)”
14 Way Yes – “Colerain”
15 Pure X – “Someone Else”
16 Phoenix – “Entertainment (Blood Orange Remix)”

Many of the new-new and more obscure tracks weren’t Spotify-able at the time of publish, so the Spot-eration of this month’s Mix features a song from each of this month’s Albums Of The Week as bonus material (hence the JT track, which is new, but also not so much):

And the Soundcloud version is most robust of all:

ADDITIONAL SPOTIFY/SOUNDCLOUD SELECTIONS:
Active Child – “Evening Ceremony“
Schoolboy Q – Yay Yay
The Thermals – “Sunset”
Danny Brown – “Kush Coma”
Mikal Cronin – “Weight”
Beyoncé – “Bow Down / I Been On”
TEEN – “Carolina”
Mount Kimbie – “Made To Stray”
Caveman – “Over My Head”
Merchandise – “Who Are You”
Austra – “Home”
James Blake – “Digital Lion”
Drake – “5am In Toronto”
Smith Westerns – “Varsity”
Eluvium – “Envenom Mettle”
Empress Of – “Hat Trick”
Milk Music – “Cruising With God”