RIAA takes down Muxtape, there must be a better solution

Written on 19th August 2008                                                                                                              4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

A wave of disbelieve rolled through the Next Web office today; one of our favorite music services – Muxtape – is down due to a problem with the RIAA (This is the Recording Industry Association of America, a trade group that represents the major labels of the recording industry in the United States). Yesterday I celebrated an interesting move by the giant media companies, as some of them had found an interesting compromise with YouTube. Instead of removing illegal videos, they claimed advertising space on the video pages.

But such a form of creativity isn’t yet reality in the world of online music services. Pandora has been facing threats of closure – due to ridiculous fees it has to pay for every song that would be played on their station. These fees might even threaten CBS’s LastFM.

Although the New York-based team believes the site will be back in a “brief period”, Muxtape seems to be offline for almost six hours now. There’s not much information, only a brief message on the Muxtape blog

No artists or labels have complained. The site is not closed indefinitely. Stay tuned.
Beta users of Muxtape For Bands: you are unaffected by this outage.

My guess is that the RIAA has found out about the “radio” function of Muxtape, and decided the start-up has to pay the fee as well. I wonder whether there are different ways of “sorting things out” than paying the damn money.