Muxtape Explains RIAA Shutdown

Sam Gustin writes: Last month, the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group that represents the major labels, forced music sharing website Muxtape offline.

"For the past several months, we have communicated our legal concerns with the site and repeatedly tried to work with them to have illegal content taken down," the RIAA said in a statement.

In the wake of the shutdown, Justin Oullette, Muxtape's founder, declined all media requests, leaving only a cryptic note on the site which read: "Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA."

Now, Oulette has explained the shutdown, again with a message on the site's front page, this one decidedly longer. It's a heartfelt message that offers a rare glimpse inside the negotiating rooms of the recording industry.

It's well worth reading the entire, sad story. Oulette's dedication to music and his users comes across as clear as a bell.

Bottom line: After months of talks with the labels, the RIAA forced Oullette to shut the site down, just as he was in licensing negotiations with the labels. He had hired lawyers, and was in the midst of the talks when word came from Amazon Web Services, his hosting provider.

Among other things, Oullette learned that "the RIAA moves quite autonomously from their label parents and that the understanding I had with them didn't necessarily carry over."

"And so I made one of the hardest decisions I've ever faced: I walked away from the licensing deals," Oullette writes. "They had become too complex for a site founded on simplicity, too restrictive and hostile to continue to innovate the way I wanted to."

Oullette promised Muxtape will return, this time as a venue for emerging bands to get their material out there.

"Muxtape is relaunching as a service exclusively for bands, offering an extremely powerful platform with unheard-of simplicity for artists to thrive on the internet," he writes. "The new Muxtape will allow bands to upload their own music and offer an embeddable player that works anywhere on the Web, in addition to the original muxtape format."

Again, read Oullette's note. It provides one of the most powerful primers of where things stand with the emerging digital economy that I've seen.