Muxtape 1.0 is dead…to be replaced by 2.0
It’s back! Albeit in a totally different direction.
Justin Ouellette, the creator of the popular mixtape sharing website, Muxtape, has announced his plans to re-launch the site as a platform for indie artists after the RIAA shut it down last month. He explained that the new version will help new and aspiring bands promote their music for free to a potentially huge audience, ala MySpace.
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.
As well as selling their own music, new artists can offer potential listeners an embeddable music player so that they can listen to all their tracks, as well as having their own profile with a calendar, tour dates and all that jazz.
However, the people who can only be described as “industry observers” are claiming that Muxtape is going to have strong competition in the shape of TuneCore and Music Nation among others. One of those “observers” is Aram Sinnreich, a media professor at the New York University Steinhardt School:
It has been reduced to an online digital band service company which is good, but it’s hardly the innovative service for music fans that it was.
But what happened to the old Muxtape? Well, Justin goes on at great length in his statement at the legal issues that were continually and annoyingly poking him, which you can read using the first link in this post. What I will say though is that it’s a very interesting first-hand account of what happens when you do something that annoys the majors. However, this quote is a good sum up:
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.
I will miss the old Muxtape as it was a brilliant website for music fans across the world until it got ruined by the RIAA, who always have a habit of spoiling the fun for the people it’s trying to convince to buy music. Either way, I wish Justin the best of luck with Muxtape 2.0.
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Posted on September 26th, 2008 by Max
Filed under: News
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