Stupid and counterproductive.

1) Kill every music discovery engine that isn't owned by a major record label / media corp, who are the only people who can keep them afloat due to the new hefty internet radio fees (hint: Last.fm + CBS = alive & well ).

2) Wait until all major labels have a stable music discovery service in place and independent services are too scared to start up, so that there's only about 4 places to get music.

3) Start charging subscription fees directly to the consumer to use music discovery services OR make advertising to be more like commercial radio (IE: really obnoxious and intrusive).

Basically, they won't give up until the power is back in the hands of the majors.

I recently wrote about it at SitePoint, actually. I think it'd be right up your alley.

I feel a bit badly being a vulture here (esp as I love the simplicity of Muxtape), but if you get a chance you might check out our crew's new venture, called 8tracks.

We've tried to "bridge the gap" in a sense, to offer a useful way for people to create and share online mixes (playlists) while still falling under the compulsory license for webcasting (so artists get paid, and so we don't get sued).

I really hope that there's a positive outcome - music discovery services can obviously be used to drive on-line sales by linking out to Amazon, iTunes, emusic, etc, so I really do think it is a case of working out terms, and they really do need to do what's required to encourage innovation in the area.

BUT . . . I don't think this is about piracy this time. I'm guessing it's about unlicensed broadcasting - at the end of the day, there are businesses, like radio stations, that are competing for our attention, and that are paying their royalty payments. If I run a business that is paying the RIAA or MCPS I'm going to seriously question why other people don't have to.

There are legitimate arguments over the scale of those payments (i.e. most songs on Muxtape will have less listeners than even a small college radio station would deliver) and something really needs to be done around internationalisation (a framework exists for exchanging radio play royalties because radio stations already play recordings from other territories).

What I don't think you can say is that 'wahey, it's a Web 2.0 world so all the content I want for my business should be free because software is free'. When people choose free software they look at the licence - they use Apache on Linux rather than a pirated copy of IIS on Windows. Yet somehow this respect for licence terms and copyright goes out of the window when it comes to the content that drives their business.

We all know that connecting users with commercially produced content is far bigger business than connecting user with user produced content, yet everyone wants to pretend that the cost of producing this content is going to be monetized elsewhere - that we are not creating the new channels by which production will be funded.

I am not defending RIAA, I am just saying this wouldn't have happened if muxtape was a service for playlists of creative commons (and other share-friendly licenses) material.

It is sad in a way that I cannot use classic pop songs on a playlist, but I believe we should think forward. If enough people support and create a bigger demand for open creative works, the artists will naturally go in that direction and RIAA, SoudExchange and others will loose power.

I for one do not mind in not having Metallica on my setlists.

The world and history is running fast and they do not understand this very simply fact. RIAA immagination is too poor.

Do you want an example? Tomorrow I, you or someonelse could create a russian version of Muxtape. Immagine RIAA:"Dear Mr. Putin please please shutdown that server" and Mr. Putin:"Ok amerikan guys choose! What do you prefer Helvis Presley or... Georgia?" :)

my two cents

What I really would have liked to see is incorporating things like Twitter to create "interactive muxtapes" in which people would send in requests to the owner. I started adding my Twitter info to the title this week only to see it shut down before I could enjoy the experiment.

Hopefully it comes back in some sort of Creative Commons version in which you'll see "My Unsigned Band Mix" rather than "Portishead's New Album Mix". It'll also be interesting to see if people take more of the Seeqpod streaming content search approach in which you could create a playlist, but not actually host any of the data.