In what may be a sign of things to come, Muxtape, the popular vitual-mixtape generating website has been shut down. Visitors to the website are greeted with the message: “Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.” Although according to a post on the Mixtape Tumblr “no artists or labels complained”, clearly someone did and the RIAA took action forcing the service to close down “for a brief period”. As for how long the “brief period” will last, no one knows.
Muxtape may not be the only popular music service to shut down, late last week Pandora announced that it may be forced to shut down if online royalty rates didn’t decrease really soon. For now music lovers are going to find another place to fill their music void, Pirate Bay is starting to sound pretty good right about now.
Update: The RIAA has responded to the shutdown. Speaking to Portfolio.com they said the following:
“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. Muxtape was hosting copies of copyrighted sound recordings without authorization from the copyright owners. Making these recordings available for streaming playback also requires authorization from the copyright owners. Muxtape has not obtained authorization from our member companies to host or stream copies of their sound recordings.”
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