Muxtape was one of the simplest but most effective ways of sharing and listening to new and old music on the Internet, at least until it got shut down by the RIAA back in August. It’s now coming back in a different format, but more interesting than that, the site’s founder, Justin Ouellette, has explained how and why Muxtape got canned in the first place. It seems that the RIAA are more like the Mafia in the way they go about things.

Muxtape was an online resource enabling people to share their favourite songs with others over the Web. Rather than offering every song in a searchable list, you selected songs to compile in to a playlist, or mixtape, named it, and uploaded your selection to the site.

Muxtape was always destined to get in trouble from the authorities, as the songs on the site included copyrighted recordings which Ouellette had no right to host on the site. There were also no royalties being paid to the artists concerned. So when the RIAA eventually caught up with Muxtape, it didn’t surprise any of us.

However, Ouellette has now announced that Muxtape is coming back, albeit in a totally new format. This time there will be no fears of legal reprisals as the bands whose songs are made available on the site will be fully aware of it and condoning it in an effort to establish themselves online. While a nice idea, it strikes me as offering nothing more than something unsigned bands can already manage on MySpace.

Along with the announcement of the comeback, Ouellette, who started the site to keep track of his university radio station playlists, posted a detailed history of Muxtape, from those humble beginnings to the moment the site was killed off by the thugs at the RIAA.

There was a misconception that Muxtape managed to stay alive and out of trouble by flying under the radar and not being noticed by the record labels or the RIAA. However, it seems that this wasn’t the case. In fact, the RIAA contacted Ouellette within a week of the site going live.

Ouellette then started having meetings and negotiating with some of the big four record labels over the possibility of turning Muxtape in to a fully legal, licensed service. An agreement was being reached, although there were still concerns over the amount of input the record companies wanted to have on the site.

But then it all went wrong. On August 15th, the RIAA contacted Amazon Web Services, which was the company hosting the site and all of its files, asking for the site to be shut down. Amazon gave Ouellette one business day to remove a huge list of songs or face immediate deletion from the servers.

When the time limit expired, Amazon did indeed shut down the site and locked Ouellette out. It seems the RIAA had moved independently of the record labels they are meant to represent, and got the site closed down without sparing a moment’s thought for the potentially lucrative licensing deal that was being discussed.

Oullette’s account of Muxtape makes for compelling reading, but it shows how brutal and almost thuggish the RIAA is in dealing with sites that it deems to be encroaching on its members rights. Maybe the name should be changed to the IRA as that seems to be about right for an organisation as unyielding as this.

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Entry was posted on Friday, September 26th, 2008 at 8:12 pm under Internet, Legal, Opinion.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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