Muxtape Quietly Shut by RIAA

Bad news for multiple fans of the music mixtape startup Muxtape - RIAA has shut the service and no one even seems to have any details. What probably happened is that RIAA has realized that users uploaded and shared tons of music and invited their friends to stream it while online radio sites are supposed to pay huge licensing fees for a very similar type of activity.

The site itself is down and shows only the text “Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA” instead of taking us to the service. Bloggers complain - some on their blogs, others on FriendFeed. Another disappointment is that the founders don’t seem to be willing to give details either - the blog post they have decided to publish on Tumblr only reads:

No artists or labels have complained. The site is not closed indefinitely. Stay tuned.

Beta users of Muxtape For Bands: you are unaffected by this outage.

So the only thing that it kind of proves is that RIAA initiated its own investigation and chose to shut the site down without complaints from artists that it is supposed to protect from copyright infringement. Or at least this is what MuxTape claims and what I tend to believe is true since RIAA is well-known for its decisions that damage music lovers heavily if the association is not happy about the way we consume music, even if in some cases owners of this music are absolutely happy or at least do not mind it.

I hope additional details will show up eventually on Muxtape blog or somewhere else I am really not that optimistic about how “brief” the period of Muxtape downtime will be.