Remember high school circa the early 90s? I do, and the best way to say “I love you” was to painstakingly craft a mix tape Lloyd Dobler style.
Now that we all have 100s of internet friends we need a new internet mixtape. Enter Muxtape: the web startup I’m most jealous of. Jealous because of its beautiful clarity, and because it’s the work of just one talented guy, Justin Ouellette (even his photography rocks).
Of course he’s built his service on copyright infringement — it even makes money with Amazon affiliate links for pirate bonus points — so I’m sure the RIAA’s black bag men will be at Justin’s door in short order. Too bad. Muxtape is the best music marketing tool I’ve ever seen.
Music is the most powerful medium. Kids don’t buy clothes at Hot Topic so they can identify with a visual arts movement. They buy The Queen is Dead t-shirts to identify with their tribe. Adolescence is a struggle for identity and music is a huge part of that identity. Ever notice how “what music do you like” is a stock “getting to know you” question and how everyone always says “I like everything” because they’re not ready to be judged by you? Notice how you’ll meet people who know nothing about art or books, no big deal, but there’s just something off about someone without strong music preferences? At my last on-site consulting gig I met someone like that and it was downright creepy to hear her say “I only like Josh Groban.” You can love music that I hate, but you at least have to have a preference.
That’s why mixtapes are so powerful. When you say “I like this, and I like you well enough to hope you like it” you’re inviting someone into your tribe. Of course Muxtape isn’t as intimate, but it makes up for it in reach. You can post your muxtape link in your sidebar and say more about yourself than any “about” page ever could.
I hope Muxtape lives forever. It may escape destruction because it’s “ethical” copyright infringement. You can’t download the songs, it invites you to buy, and you can only upload 12 songs (Which is good because constaints make you selective. It’s the opposite of just dumping a friend’s hard drive onto yours).
Nevermind the socio-business-speak, here’s the music:
- Sandra’s muxtape
- Jose’s
- Micah’s
- Doug’s
- My muxtape (Please forgive the juxtaposition of George Michael and Johnny Cash. I am aware that I’m the world’s worst DJ.)
Do you have a Muxtape? Post it in the comments!
Update: In the comments MakeItEasy mentions that imeem.com should get respect since they were first and did everything by the book. Being first (to say nothing of following the RIAA playbook) isn’t enough. Imeem is to Muxtape as Yahoo is to Google.
27 Comments ↓
I got the best one:
http://fart.muxtape.com/
SNAP! Why didn’t I think of that? Awesome :-)
I love when people give their Muxtapes interesting themes. I didn’t give mine one though, aside from “stuff I’ve been listening to in April”. Still cool tunes though :-)
http://bloodyawful.muxtape.com
Good point about the “ethical” infringement. In a sane world, a major label would buy this up and do something positive with it rather than simply sueing it. *sigh*
this is a specifically themed muxtape
http://grimepays.muxtape.com/
roadsbetweenus.muxtape.com
http://www.byepolar.muxtape.com
i’ve already purchased a lot of music via muxtape. record companies love an easy way to make money, and this one dropped in their lap. they should just walk away and watch their sales grow.
crookedroad.muxtape.com
catbird.muxtape.com
Everyone’s posting great mixes, though I think Darwin wishes he had Doug’s MuxName.
I’m already running into one of the limitations of Muxtape that doesn’t rock: only being able to favorite 12 Muxes.
The other limitation as Kelley points out on her mux is that MP4s are not supported, but according to the Muxtape blog they’re working on it.
Keep the great mixes coming!
FYI: if you love the whole online mixtape idea then you really need to give some respect to imeem.com which started doing this 2 years ago. Not only that, but they’ve gone through the legal hoops to make it all legal, so when someone listens to your mix and hears a Morrisey track then the bequiffed master of misery recieves a royalty in exchange for playing his work on the site. (you can actually check Morrisey’s page out here http://www.imeem.com/morrissey)
It’s all paid for by advertising and frankly I’m amazed that so many muxtape fans have never heard of the site.
Thanks for the imeem.com link MakeItEasy. I’d never heard of it.
I suspect imeem’s problem is that their design is cluttered, corporate, ad ridden, unclear, inauthentic, and so desperately wants you to “sign up!”
This reminds me of Seth Godin’s point about how Google ate Yahoo’s lunch with design and not technology [the video is cued up to the relevant point].
Muxtape makes it about the user, not about the record company or even the artist. That’s what imeem missed and that’s why imeem is not being passed around from friend to friend like an awesome mixtape.
Well since the deal is that the artists get a share of advertising revenue they have to have ads on the page, the alternative is ads during the music, I know which I’d prefer.
Besides, I think you’ve underestimated how ‘passed around’ imeem is already, take a look at Dave Porters comparison of Web 2.0 site popularity http://davidporter.wordpress.com/2008/04/06/top-25-music-sites-march-2008/
and you’ll see that imeem is more than twice as popular as the next ranked site.
I think a lot of bloggers wrote it off as ‘another social network’ a long time ago and never followed it through its transformation into the youtube of music.
(interestingly, according to wikipedia, many of the original imeem programmers came from the original napster after it was shut down.
Thanks for the insight MakeItEasy. Clearly imeem deserves credit, there’s no comparison in terms of traffic. Muxtape and imeem are doing different things too. Maybe I’m just too in love with Muxtape at the moment, but when I look at imeem I just have no urge to sign up and use it.
If a friend sent me an imeem playlist I’d say cool, but I wouldn’t feel compelled to set up my own and then tell others about it. Of course the music market is filled with a million niches and tons of different audience types, so imeem is probably just what the doctor ordered for some people.
My reaction to Muxtape probably has a lot to do with my recently reading Seth Godin’s book “All Marketers are Liars” which has totally changed the way I understand and experience marketing.
Muxtape is cool indeed and it will be sad to see it in trouble with RIAA. One problem I think is major is that the music can indeed be downloaded and pretty easily (anyone with minimal computer skills can figure out how to do it and I believe soon there is going to be a tool available to automate that). If Muxtape could manage to avoid it (and here technology plays an important role, that is why I do not think your yahoo-google analogy is accurate) that could enforce an ethical copyright infringement defensive position (a concept that copyright owners surely do not share or endorse and that is also a point to consider). This minor glitch makes me believe that Muxtape will face some issues, which is sad because it is a very cool way to interact with the web crowd.
http://youarethewords.muxtape.com/
Mark, it would be bad news if someone invented an app with a “pirate this muxmix” button, but WAY more powerful infringement tools like email, Google MP3 search, burnable DVDs w/ the postal service, bittorrent, and even the external drive on my desk, already exist.
Worrying about piracy or technology too much makes people miss out on all the opportunities, but I guess we are still monkeys deep down: can’t let go of one vine until we’ve got a really firm grasp on the next one.
With my new overbearing Seth Godin marketing worldview (you know how recent converts are the most zealous) here are a couple of ways that Muxtape totally succeeds:
Off point, I am LOVING all the new music I’ve heard from mixes people have posted here.
Special mention:
Kelley’s http://roadsbetweenus.muxtape.com - MGMT - Electric Feel
See what just happened there? You might click on that, and that song might just change your life. :)
Nathan,
I have been listening to Muxtapes and having a lot of fun. And most because mixtapes impregnated our minds since childhood and Justin took all possible advantage of that with an amazing simple and iconographical home page.
Totally agree with your points. Let`s see if the black bag man gets tired before he reaches Muxtape`s door.
m
Nathan,
Apparently such an app exists, but it’s a script: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/24382
Muxtape has already had legal takedown requests, the new Scarlett Johanssend record got posted at muxtape prior to release and within a day the account had been cancelled.
So the legal eagles know all about muxtape now and the execs are now going to negotiate for their pound of flesh.
Anyone want to place bets on what comes first? A lawsuit? Or a Deal?
A Scarlett Johansson takedown is probably a good thing :)
I don’t think an entertainment company would do a deal, they don’t want to break ranks and they don’t want to be a target. Hence the ancient Vulcan proverb: only Nixon could go to China and only Google could buy YouTube.
The infringing uses of these services get the most attention, but the legitimate marketing uses are the most interesting. Now a band can easily self publish videos and music and even sell media without worrying about bandwidth bills and fans can easily help promote them too. Any unsigned band would be stupid not to take advantage of “new marketing”, and smaller bands that have signed away marketing responsibilities are probably kicking themselves.
Enjoyable article! I like Muxtape a lot, but I enjoy MixWit(.com) even more because you can embed the tape right on your blog/site.
“I don’t think an entertainment company would do a deal, they don’t want to break ranks and they don’t want to be a target.”
They made a deal with imeem, Warner music was the first to sue and soon after the lawsuit was dropped and a deal was announced, the other record labels quickly followed on with their own deals.
Your comment about non-infringing uses of this media is valid, but if muxtape is going to use this defense it will have to demonstrate that the majority of the content is posted by copyright holders. This will mean extensive policing of mixes and a content filtering system to enforce the copyright limitations. This then leads to a question: how can an indie band promote its tunes on muxtape if it can only post its own tunes. Well the answer is obvious there becomes a ‘white list’ of cleared music and the extent of this catalog depends on which labels want to make deals.
But even extensive limitations may not be enough. Around the end of last year all Universal Music artists on myspace had their music converted to 30 second previews because Universal wanted a share of the advertising revenue from myspace (just like what all the labels get from imeem), myspace eventually gave in.
I see a few outcomes for muxtape
Step 1 - lawsuits from content holders
1) muxtape gets shut down - Unlikely
2) muxtape bans all major label music, makes cheap deals with indie labels - possible, but the majors may force some settlement terms on muxtape to drop the lawsuit
3) muxtape finds a VC who’ll pay the 30million dollars bribe it’ll need to convince the labels to drop their lawsuits and let them in.
Step 2 - Pay for the bandwidth, label deals and employee salaries
a) advertising everywhere! Say farewell to your yahoo - google analogy
b) Subscriptions - make users pay, and leave the freeloaders to their ad encumbered music sites.
I don’t see subscriptions on their own as being likely, but they might be offered as a premium feature where users pay not to see or hear ads.
http://drunkerthansatan.muxtape.com
The RIAA would have a hard time taking this guy down w/ any real hurt. He’s covered under the DMCA. As I understand it, he would be considered a service provider w/ no real control over the content added to his site. The DMCA offers some safeharbor protection for people like this guy providing this service. Web hosts are covered in much of the same manner. I am not an attorney, but this is just how I understand how the DMCA would operate. The RIAA would likely require that he remove all offending content within a particular timeframe or face claims of willful infringement. But I bet they’re looking for some way to squeeze some cash out of him in settlement of any claim of infringement they may bring against him.
Good luck with that defence, it worked well for Napster, Grokster, Kazaa etc….
The safe harbor protection has its limits, the availability of robust filtering systems has been used by lawyers as an example a technology which can be added to file sharing systems to make the sharing of non licensed content harder, if not impossible.
Kazaa went this route, the current Kazaa download doesn’t let you share files that are known to be copyrighted content.
On the website front look at the 3 biggest - youtube has its own in house filtering system, myspace uses gracenote’s content ID system and imeem filters mp3’s uploaded using Snocap.
So, muxtape will get encouraged to install filters, and then maybe it’ll get a chance to make legal deals with the record labels.
Just like imeem did a year ago.
I just heard about muxtape yesterday. Cool beans. It seems to be quite under the radar, but there are so many users. Any idea how Justin handled the publicity to get the site’s users? Was it a service built on top of another site?
“It seems to be quite under the radar, but there are so many users.”
It’s certainly getting a lot of blog attention, but in terms of actual popularity it has 1-2% of the users visiting sites like imeem and projectplaylist.
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/imeem.com+playlist.com+muxtape.com/?metric=uv
I believe that muxtape’s userbase is almost exclusively blog driven, muxtape had a somewhat unique take on playlist sharing, and it had no legal encumberment so it spread quickly.