When Muxtape was assailed by the RIAA I felt nothing more than depressed. Not confused, not surprised, depressed. The idiocy was so transparently obvious it beggared belief. Dumb and dumber.
I didn’t get too vocal about it I just linked to Muxtape’s man-behind-the-scenes, Justin’s blog. Meanwhile Sasha Frere-Jones tore into the RIAA on his blog -
If you are looking for a story that encapsulates all the short-sightedness, greed, and plain old dumbassery bringing down the music industry right now, I’ve got a candidate for you — Muxtape. Click on that link and you will read the whole story of the Web site, told by its founder, Justin. (No last names—the law is funny about names.) In short, the site offered you the ability to create a twelve-song mixtape which would stream from the Web. You uploaded your songs of choice, and then your playlist was rendered in enormous black Helvetica type on a white background. Clicking a title would cause it to play. Simple, and addictive. I made six or seven of them, and probably spent about forty hours in total on them. No regrets.
Full story here.
Related story: According to CNet the RIAA has shut down Muxtape. Sigh……
Yeah, Justin’s piece was easily the most interesting thing written about the music debacle in years. I loved the imagery of the biz dev people on one side of the conf table and the lawyers on the other. One threatening, one wooing. Lefsetz is so right when he calls Iovine et al “thugs”
lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2006/07/14/one-on-one-with-michael-rapino/
October 13th, 2008 at 11:24 amA depressing story indeed…one more in a long line of saddening tales involving the RIAA and the “industry” in general.
At this point we’re left to play with Open Tape (http://opentape.fm/), Mixwit (http://www.mixwit.com/), and can only remain nostalgic about Muxtape which was one of the better things to happen between music and technology in recent years (http://muxtape.com/remembers/pampelmoose).
October 13th, 2008 at 1:39 pm