Save Muxtape

Usually it’s all fun and games on this corner of the internet, but it’s time to get serious for a sec. Muxtape, one of my favorite websites to discover new music, is in a conflict with the RIAA, thus it is temporarily unavailable.

Let’s be honest and say it never was a question whether the RIAA would shut down Muxtape, but rather when it would shut it down. Even though Muxtape never received complaints from any artists or labels, the RIAA stepped in last month and put enough pressure on the creator of the site to have it temporarily removed.

I’ll make my pro-Muxtape argument short and sweet. The best part of the service is that users, for the most part, uploaded tapes as creative expressions of their tastes, emotions, and general love of music. It was never about being another avenue to pirate music. There were actual people behind the tapes, and not algorithms like on Pandora. Forgive me for using marketing jargon, but these people are “brand ambassadors” for the artists included on their tapes. And that’s a VERY powerful thing to have if you want to sell a product.

I would love to see Muxtape come back, and it probably could if it adopted an ad-supported system to help pay fees to ASCAP, BMI, and the other music publishing organizations. Bonus points if those ads are relevant to the users of Muxtape, as in music and culture-related ads.

That is all.