p2pnet news view Music | RIAA News:-“Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA,” said a message on the site in August.

It was “free streaming music website that allows users to create their own 12-song mixtapes,” said The Rap Up, the operative word being “was”.

Now, “relaunching soon, in the service of bands,” says the site.

What was it all about?

‘Where do I send the summons and complaint?’

On the Muxtape site, its creator, Justin Ouellette, says there was a popular misconception he managed to stay online only because he was “flying under the radar,” and the moment the major labels noticed, he’d be gone.

But, “the labels and the RIAA read web sites like everyone else, and I heard from them both within a week or so,” he says, going on »»»

An RIAA notice arrived in triplicate, via email, registered mail, and FedEx overnight (with print and CD versions). They demanded that I take down six specific muxtapes they felt were infringing, so I did.

Around the same time I got a call from the VP of anti-piracy at one of the majors. After I picked up the phone his first words were, “Justin, I just have one question for you: where do I send the summons and complaint?” The conversation picked up from there. There was no summons, it was an intimidation tactic setting the tone for the business development meeting he was proposing, the true reason for the call. Around the same time another one of the big four’s business developers reached out to me, too.

I spent the next month listening. I talked to a lot of very smart lawyers and other people whose opinions on the matter I respected, trying to gain a consensus for Muxtape’s legality. The only consensus seemed to be that there was no consensus. I had two dozen slightly different opinions that ran the gamut from “Muxtape is 100% legal and you’re on solid ground,” to “Muxtape is a cesspool of piracy and I hope you’re ready for a hundred million dollar lawsuit and a stint at Riker’s.”

In the end, Muxtape’s legality was moot. I didn’t have any money to defend against a lawsuit, just or not, so the major labels had an ax over my head either way.

Then in May Ouellette had a meeting with the Universal Music Group and, “I’m here to tell you now that the labels understand their business a lot better than most people suspect, although they each have their own surprisingly distinct personality when it comes to how they approach the future,” he says, stating»»»

The gentlemen I met at Universal were incredibly receptive and tactful; I didn’t have to sell them on why Muxtape was good for them, they knew it was cool and just wanted to get paid. I sympathized with that. I told them I needed some time to get a proposal together and we left things in limbo.

A few weeks later I had a meeting with EMI, the character of which was much different. I walked into a conference room and shook eight or nine hands, sitting down at a conference table with a phonebook-thick file labeled “Muxtape” laying on it. The people I met formed a semi-circle around me like a split brain, legal on one side and business development on the other. The meeting alternated between an intense grilling from the legal side (”you are a willful infringer and we are mere hours from shutting you down”) and an awkward discussion with the business side (”assuming we don’t shut you down, how do you see us working together?”). I asked for two weeks to make a proposal, they gave me two days.

Ouellette figured he had three options: shut everything down; ban major label content; or, approach a fully licensed model, toward which he’d been edging toward since the Universal meeting.

“I knew other licensed services so far had met with mixed success, but I also knew Muxtape was different and that it was at least worth exploring,” he says. “The question about whether or not the labels saw value in it had been answered, the new question was how much it was going to cost.”

He spent the next few weeks at meetings and then, on August 15th, Amazon Web Services, the platform hosting Muxtape’s servers and files, got in touch.

They’d received a complaint from the RIAA and »»»

Per Amazon’s terms, I had one business day to remove an incredibly long list of songs or face having my servers shut down and data deleted. This came as a big surprise to me, as I’d been thinking that I hadn’t heard from the RIAA in a long time because I had an understanding with the labels. I had a panicked exchange of emails with Amazon, trying to explain that I was in the middle of a licensing deal, that I suspected it was a clerical error, and that I was doing everything I could to get someone to vouch for me on a summer Friday afternoon. My one business day extended over the weekend, and on Monday when I wasn’t able to produce the documentation Amazon wanted (or even get someone from the RIAA on the phone), the servers were shut down and I was locked out of the account. I moved the domain name to a new server with a short message and the very real expectation that I could get it sorted out. I still thought it was all just a big mistake.

He was wrong. We are, after all, talking about the RIAA.

Bottom line? “I walked away from the licensing deals. They had become too complex for a site founded on simplicity, too restrictive and hostile to continue to innovate the way I wanted to. They’d already taken so much attention away from development that I started to question my own motivations. I didn’t get into this to build a big company as fast as I could no matter what the cost, I got into this to make something simple and beautiful for people who love music, and I plan to continue doing that.”

Now, Muxtape is back, but with a new central focus, says Ouellette, adding:

“Muxtape is relaunching as a service exclusively for bands, offering an extremely powerful platform with unheard-of simplicity for artists to thrive on the internet. Musicians in 2008 without access to a full time web developer have few options when it comes to establishing themselves online, but their needs often revolve around a common set of problems. The new Muxtape will allow bands to upload their own music and offer an embeddable player that works anywhere on the web, in addition to the original muxtape format. Bands will be able to assemble an attractive profile with simple modules that enable optional functionality such as a calendar, photos, comments, downloads and sales, or anything else they need. The system has been built from the ground up to be extended infinitely and is wrapped in a template system that will be open to CSS designers. There will be more details soon. The beta is still private at the moment, but that will change in the coming weeks.

“I realize this is a somewhat radical shift in functionality, but Muxtape’s core goals haven’t changed. I still want to challenge the way we experience music online, and I still want to work to enable what I think is the most interesting aspect of interconnected music: discovering new stuff.

“Thank to you everyone who made Muxtape the incredible place it was in its first phase, it couldn’t have happened without your mixes. The industry will catch up some day, it pretty much has to.”

What of Opentape a, “free, open-source package that lets you make and host your own mixtapes on the web,” filling the gap when Muxtape was down?

“Upload songs (via web or FTP), reorder, rename, customize the style, and share what you like on other sites with an embeddable player.”

It’s still there. And so is the demo.

The Rap Up - RIAA Shuts Down Muxtape, August 19, 2008
Muxtape site – Muxtape – relaunching soon, in the service of bands, September, 2008

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 26th, 2008 at 8:20 am and is filed under Music, RIAA News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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