Nothing's changed...
I'm Morrissey sad. Muxtape looks like this today...
What's Muxtape? I wrote about the music service that mimics creating a mix tape back in April when it launched. At the time, I noted: "just as soon as I got excited about it, I thought that anything as fun/cool as this must be illegal."
Alas.
The folks at Muxtape are saying that they will be back and that no artists or labels have complained. But, for a music industry that is speaking out of one side of its mouth about how they "get it" now and have learned their lesson (over and over), it doesn't look great.*
Neither does the slow train wreck that is Pandora and the rest of the Web radio licensing mess that stopped making sense a long time ago. Yesterday, The Post wrote about how one of the most popular music discovery services (that happens to stream tracks) is on the road to ruin).
Mike Masnick writes about it with the type of cynicism that makes me question my tones of optimism when Muxtape first came out...
This is exactly what the RIAA wants, by the way. Even if services like Pandora introduce people to tons of music (personally, I've bought a ton of music I found on Pandora), much of that music is not from an RIAA-member label. The RIAA knew exactly what it was doing in pushing these higher rates: it was killing off alternative routes to promoting non-RIAA music. The RIAA labels have always thrived off a very limited distribution and promotion channel. After all, distribution and promotion are where record labels really make their money. Competing methods of distribution and promotion are threats to be killed off -- and the RIAA may have succeeded here (with Congress' and the courts' help, of course).
*If this is a publicity ploy by Muxtape after the initial shiny wore off on them, they are geniuses.
Update: Use your whack-a-mole analogy here: 8Tracks does the same thing as Muxtape as is living and breathing at the moment.
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