RIAA catches up with Muxtape – death or slight knock?
Muxtape, the online mixtape sharing website, was always going to run in to trouble with the RIAA – it was just a matter of time. Now that time has come, and Muxtape is currently unavailable, so is this likely to be the end of the popular service or merely a slight knock to proceedings?
I am a big fan of Muxtape, and was using it to listen to songs I liked and songs other people thought I would like on a regular basis. However, as soon as it appeared, it seemed obvious to me that the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) would soon be paying the guys behind the site a visit. That now seems to have happened.
Anyone visiting the site from August 18 found the following message staring back at them:
Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.
Short, sweet, and to the point. But it could also mean the end of yet another Web application that allows us ordinary folk to share our musical tastes with others.
For the uninitiated, and you may now never get the chance to sample the simple delights of Muxtape, the site allowed users to upload their favourite songs and list them as an old-fashioned mixtape. Anyone who has ever seen the film High Fidelity will know all about the power of a mixtape.
Visitors to the site could then listen to any individual song from one of these muxtapes or if they were more adventurous, the whole thing. The site is (was) easy to navigate and has (had) no unnecessary frills messing up the simple joy of listening to someone else’s eclectic musical loves. But it could now be dead thanks to the RIAA.
The message on the site seems optimistic but “a problem with the RIAA” usually means a long and drawn-out legal battle will ensue. The Muxtape blog claims this is just a temporary outage:
No artists or labels have complained. The site is not closed indefinitely. Stay tuned.
The whole idea of sharing songs you love seems to be a legal grey area, but it’s likely to be the fact that the songs could be easily and freely downloaded that has made the RIAA step in.
For Muxtape to make it back on to the Web in its current form, it’s likely that the streaming format of the songs will have to be changed to make it much harder to download them. Or the whole venture will have to be monetized, with the revenue being used to pay for the royalty licenses required.
What with Muxtape being shut down and Pandora about to be forced off the airwaves, the past few days have been dire for those of us who use the Web to listen to music.
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