This sucks. Justin the creator of Muxtape—the online beautifully designed mixtape—has had to shut down the original site forever. As Justin relates, Muxtape was immediately and wildly successful. There is a market out there for a digital mixtape that conveys the same feeling as the original version's:
A physical cassette tape in your hands has such a insistent aesthetic; just holding one makes you want to find a tape player to fulfill its destiny. My goal with Muxtape’s design was to translate some of that tactility into the digital world, to build a context around the music that gave it a little extra spark of life and made the holder anxious to listen.
If you didn't get the chance to use the original Muxtap, he nailed it.
This service also came with some very real constraints. You couldn't search for any song you wanted, you had to peruse by tape or be given a link to someone's specific Muxtape page. It forced you to talk about it, share it, it was genius. You'd listen to tracks in the context the creator decided just like an actual mixtape. The legal issues that followed are detailed in Justin's story. He dealt with major record labels and the RIAA, the later of which ultimately pulled the plug on Justin's Amazon servers.
As indicated by it's instant success, there is an untapped market out there and it took a true lover of music and pirate to discover it. I've been reading The Pirate's Dilemma recently which speaks to the major record label's ability to adapt their broken business model to the new world taking shape. The music industry can no longer control distribution. They are fighting a losing battle and spending much to much time and money on suing rather than figuring out how to thrive in this new business environment.
One piece of Justin's story highlights this odd place they find themselves in. Painting a picture of the schizophrenic major:
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.
Maybe they are starting to figure out that an authentic service like Muxtape has real possibility of business success. Shit, all it would take—and what Justin eventually added—is a link from each song to the album it was from, allowing people to instantly download the MP3. Fans have always been an untapped and free authentic distribution medium. Why not give them an incredibly elegant tool to facilitate the sharing and buying of their favorite music. They had another chance to see the value and creatively capitalize on it. Instead we are all left weeping in the mux.
Oh, somewhere in this favored land the music is playing loud; Cassettes are trading somewhere, and somewhere musicians proud; And somewhere friends are laughing, and somewhere fans shout; But there is no joy in Muxville—the mighty majors have struck out.
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