Pitchfork

Back in the middle of August, we reported that Muxtape had been shut down, with a cryptic message about "a problem with the RIAA" put up in place of the site's usual virtual-mixtape-making fodder.

Now head over to Muxtape.com and you'll be greeted by a novella-length message from site founder Justin Ouellette that explains Muxtape's time in limbo, and reveals what's next for the much-loved website.

As Ouellette writes, he spent months negotiating with all four major labels to create a licensing system that would allow Muxtape to continue operating outside of the legal grey areas the site previously inhabited. Despite this, Ouellette received word on August 15 that the RIAA had contacted his web host and demanded a significant portion of Muxtape's songs be removed lest the site's servers be shut down and its files deleted.

Perplexed by this-- Ouellette had thought he was getting somewhere with his negotiations with the majors-- the Muxtape chief tried to explain his situation to the RIAA, but to no avail; hence, the site shutdown a few days later. Perhaps most alarming/maddening is Ouellette's admission that he "learned...that the RIAA moves quite autonomously from their label parents." You'd think an organization whose mission "is to foster a business and legal climate that supports and promotes our members' [including the major labels] creative and financial vitality" would try to be on the same page as those members, no?

Ouellette's frustrations over the RIAA incident and the increasing complexity of the proposed licensing deals with the majors led him to abandon his approach and rethink Muxtape.

As he writes, "I didn't get into this to build a big company as fast as I could no matter what the cost, I got into this to make something simple and beautiful for people who love music, and I plan to continue doing that."

With that in mind, Ouellette has made the decision to relaunch Muxtape in the coming weeks "as a service exclusively for bands," one that allows them "to upload their own music and [utilize] an embeddable player that works anywhere on the web, in addition to the original muxtape format," plus do other network-y things. Sounds an awful like MySpace or IMEEM or PureVolume or whatever, but so long as I don't have to look at any goddamned garish animated .GIF backdrops (he did say "simple and beautiful"), count me in.

As Ouellette sums up, "I realize this is a somewhat radical shift in functionality, but Muxtape's core goals haven't changed. I still want to challenge the way we experience music online, and I still want to work to enable what I think is the most interesting aspect of interconnected music: discovering new stuff."

Thanks to reader Rhett McNeil for the tip.