RIAA - Ridding the Internet of its Awesome Abilities

The RIAA has been doing this since Napster with concerted and ruthless effort - in other words for the last 9 years. I am a little sick of hearing about this type of news, as I am with the music of a now much smaller stable of artists the Big Labels have been pumping into the community during this time.

Here are some factors I attribute to the decline in the music industry:

- Artists are locked into contracts with RIAA labels

- Most artists still looking for the best deal. Label can provide advances and recording studios. Even big name artists speaking out against P2P.

- CDs, which were once the dominant format are now being marginalized, but only slowly. The equipment is still around and goes through a replacement cycle by users. Handheld and car players have taken time to be developed and purchased.

- Ogg and FLAC have only slowly risen in popularity, with MP3 a royalty imbuing format and yet the most prevalent.

- ISP bandwith costs for streaming have had to come down.

- Too many music sites competing for the same small-to-medium sized bands. No unified charts that could theoretically be created.

- Not enough umbrella organizations for non-RIAA sites and artists: does SoundExhange have an independent competitor?

- MusicBrainz (music metadata) not universal enough

- Micropayments not mainstream

- song-profiling, listener-profiling only a recent development, and proprietary

- Listeners still very much in love with old songs (RIAA back catalogue) with new music often of short-term quality

- Massive RIAA lobbying for home internet streaming laws, and legal action against P2P users.

- Semantic web features still in early phases to make audio and video a "free-floating" entity

- Home sound recording and production technology still improving to studio quality levels

- Ticketing and gig tracking sites: no clear cut destination.

- Does iTunes provide enough price differences between RIAA and non-RIAA content?

They will try to rid the internet of its awesome abilities, but it is obvious that they will, in the end, fail.

The internet is an unstoppable force

s/The internet/The ingenious of ability of digital information to spread/

There is a tiny bit more information on the Muxtape blog: http://muxtape.tumblr.com/post/46472068

Since the RIAA is a brand front for other brands, could we call it something that devaluates the big four memebers -

    * EMI
    * Sony BMG
    * Universal
    * Warner

Sony and BMG broke up. Bertelsmann sold their 50% to Sony. It's now dubbed Sony Music Entertainment Inc.

They aren't shut down. They are negotiating with the RIAA. They will be back up soon.

Famous last words.

A real shame. I really liked muxtape, thought it was dead simple and very cool. Although, it says currently that they are sorting out issues with the RIAA, not permanently shut down...

I <3 muxtape. :'(

I really hope they can sort this out..

Aww, just a few days after I discovered it. Even if they got shut down, I hope they make the names of the songs on my favourite playlists available to me, cos I found some good stuff there.

(On a side note, it's a bit annoying how much emo rock seems to be loved by people on the intranets)

Hmm I can see something similar happen to mixturtle (http://www.mixturtle.com)

RIAA wants to destroy all sources of unpaid listening out there. Bastards...

Check out http://songza.com/ - it's a searchable audio jukebox of RIAA content as streamed into the browser from YouTube's audio channel. As such, neither the metadata nor sound quality is as good as Mixturtle, but the breadth of content is better. Songza also finds other music files using http://skreemr.com/, an audio file search engine.

Another alternative is http://listen.grooveshark.com/

I only realized that Songza pulled from YouTube yesterday. Clever.

don't understand what the fuss is about, there are plenty of website like that around, in particular i use www.melodyshot.com, its the same concept, only difference is you can download and there a way way more results.

Didn't Muxtape just get some angel funding? I swear I read that somewhere. I hope they come back. :\

That's seriously to bad, muxtape inspired me a little bit on my own project.

Jakob's money will bail them out, dude has millions.

Blog post from Hank Williams in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

What is Muxtape?

Muxtape is down because of other reasons, think server wise. The RIAA thing is just a smokescreen.

Just being broken is a lot better than potentially getting sued to shit. Why do people always claim sites "pretend" to have down time?

People also claim that we never walked on the moon and that George W Bush planned 9/11. I imagine the reasoning is pretty much the same.

Being broken gives you an unreliable reputation and people will make fun of your lack of system operations skillz.

Being sued by the RIAA makes you look like a hero of freedom and people will say good things about you and how bad it would be if you lose.

Yeah, but if you get caught, everyone hates you. Not worth the risk, and I doubt that's the case here.

No one said it was broken. Let's try this mind exercise again: SERVER WISE what might possibly go wrong to cause Muxtape to shut down its free/consumer aspect of the site but not the professional/paid aspect of the site?