It looks like the big guys aren’t the only ones feeling the wrath of the RIAA these days, and it’s only bound to get worse. Muxtape, a service that allows users to upload music from their personal libraries to create an online mixtape, currently services less than 90,000 unique visitors per month according to Compete. That won’t keep it under the RIAA’s radar it would appear, as the service went down yesterday with the note “Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA” on its homepage. A post on the Muxtape blog provides the following message:
No artists or labels have complained. The site is not closed indefinitely. Stay tuned.
It’s funny; rather than embrace this newer wave of online music providers, it appears that labels and the RIAA are intent on destroying these emerging technologies and completely eliminating new revenue streams that have the potential to become massive. By putting a fair royalty scheme in place, the RIAA stands to pull in hundreds of millions of dollars in the short-term and this figure would only increase as internet radio stations and other online music sites continue to gain momentum. Instead, the RIAA is trying to run these sites into the ground in order to maintain the current power structure – even if that means losing out on all of this new money. Users of sites like Muxtape aren’t going to replace their “free” listening habits with purchases, they’re going to find other off-shore sites with similar functionality. Apparently for the RIAA, “nothing” is better than “something” when that “something” helps illustrate just how useless the current record label model is these days.
