The Next Web

The mixtape revival limited to 2008: Mixwit is shutting down

Written on December 18, 2008 – 12:01 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Update: I’ve emailed the founders for some more details. I’ll let you know whether get back to me.

When Muxtape closed up, I did regret the reasons - but wasn’t too sad. I used Mixwit, the cool little brother of Muxtape. Users could make mixes, based on songs from Skreemr and Seeqpod, and spice up the old-fashioned tape with a cool cover. Last night, founders Radley and Mike sent the following email to its users:

We regret to announce that Mixwit will cease to exist at the end of the year. [..] We’ve put a year of work into Mixwit so this choice wasn’t taken lightly. I won’t go into the details of our situation but state simply that we boldly marched into in a position best described as “between a rock and a hard place.” We’re very grateful to be have been part of the mixtape revival of ‘08 and are satisfied to be able to to bow out while things are still good.

Radley and Mile also praise Mixwit users with the fantastic artwork they’ve delivered. They’re trying to figure out some way to archive the artwork and playlists, “if for nothing at least historic value”. The Mixwit code might be donated to the OpenTape project.

The website and profiles will be turned off around Dec 27th and all embedded widgets will stop playing before the end of December. The boys will surprise the web scene next year with another company, they promised.

I absolutely loved this service and the way they brought music, artwork, and blogging together. Here’s a tape I made when my co-editor Boris and I rocked a Jukebox in downtown San Francisco. If you’re reading this article after December 27th, you’ll probably see nothing. How tragic.

I hope you like that post!

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Mixwit, music, Muxtape, seeqpod, Skreemr

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RIAA takes down Muxtape, there must be a better solution

Written on August 19, 2008 – 10:23 am
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.

cbs, music, music industry, Muxtape, RIAA, youtube

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