It's been a week since we asked for an interview with Muxtape founder Justin Oullette to find out about the site's still-cryptic RIAA-induced blackout.
Oullette has yet to get back to us. The site is still down. We'd still love to hear from you, Justin.
It's still possible that at any given moment the note that has been on the sight since last week – "Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA" – will be replaced by the mix sharing gloriousness we knew and loved.
So we don't want to sound like we're delivering a sort of eulogy. No, we'll just leave that to others.
"I (too) love the user experience of Muxtape," said David Porter, founder of 8tracks (full interview).
"However, there really was no 'gray area' regarding the legality of theservice. It's an on-demandoffering, and that requires direct licenses." (The EFF's Fred von Lehman disagrees – see below.) Those licenses, he says,
cost "around $.01/stream and require fairly substantial upfronts." By"upfronts," Porter is referring to the common record label practice ofdemanding a large chunk of royalties before a company can startstreaming.
But, you hope for the best and plan for the worst. I suspect Muxtape will reemerge in somewhat altered form at some point. In the meantime, here arefive alternative services to help fill the gaping void in your soulwhere Muxtape used to be:
This one's closest to what Muxtape could look like after the RIAA is through with it. 8tracks
allows users to upload eight tracks, with no more than two by the sameartist, and then follows the internet radio model of playing the songsin order (as opposed to on an on-demand basis) in order to qualify forSoundExchange's royalty rates for small webcasters. And unlike Muxtape,
it lets you embed mixes online.
Two other services (SeeqPod and Skeemr) provide the music catalog from which Mixwit users can create embeddable mixes without having to upload anything. The service appears to be legal, because Mixwit pledges to take down copyrighted materials if the copyright holder asks them to do so. Mixes created using the site look a lot like old school cassette tapes, and their designs can be customized.
This service offers free, open-source code that anyone can upload totheir website in order to create a Muxtape-style mix of MP3s. The RIAA
had a fairly easy time taking all of thost Muxtape mixes offline,
because they were all on Muxtape's servers. OpenTape circumvents thatdefense, but the tradeoff is that individual users themselves becomeliable to accusations of copyright infringement.
It's easy to create and share a playlist with SeeqPod,
but the songs come from various blogs and music directories from aroundthe net, so you may not be able to include the exact songs that youwant.
If you already have a Pandora or Last.fm profile (and really, anyonewho knows what Muxtape almost certainly has one), all you need to do isenter your account information into FavTape in order to create a mix ofsome of your favorite music that can be shared with friends. However,
it offers the least control over the playlist of the options listedhere.
Bonus: imeem (updated)
We neglected to include this site at first, but imeem, which we use to embed songs on Listening Post quite frequently, also includes the ability to create playlists that can be shared using a simple URL (thanks, Fred).
Update: EFF senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann says Muxtape enjoys a certain degree of legal protection and asked why we didn't include imeem on this list. We've added imeem; here's what he says is wrong with Porter's above assertion about Muxtape:
"Porter is wrong about the legality of Muxtape. As I understand it, allthe content on Muxtape is uploaded by users, which means it qualifiesfor the same protections that YouTube and every other UGC site enjoysunder the DMCA safe harbors (but they have to have "notice andtakedown" and a policy for terminating users who repeatedly infringe –
I have no idea whether Muxtape followed these requirements). This issuewould have been the key question in the Warner v iMeem lawsuit, butthat one settled before we got any answers. It's also the centerpieceof the Viacom v YouTube case."
We'll keep you posted on Muxtape's status going forward.
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