Muxtape

» see muxtape.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

muxtape was a website where you could upload mp3s in a specific order and get a url. that was the entire product. justin ouellette built it in march 2008 with $95,000 from jakob lodwick, on a contract reportedly written on a napkin. the homepage was a black page with a white musical note. there was no signup flow more complicated than picking a name and a password.

the timing was right for the music-blog moment. tumblr was new and hype-machine was peaking. an entire culture of indie-rock bloggers passed each other links to obscure b-sides, and muxtape gave that culture a shareable artifact instead of a long blog post with embedded mp3s. 8,685 people signed up the first day. 97,748 in the first month.

on august 18, 2008 the front page was replaced with a one-line message: "muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the riaa." that brief period turned out to be most of a year. ouellette tried to relaunch in january 2009 as a service for unsigned artists to upload their own catalogs, which is a different product entirely. it never gained the user base of the original. the site went inactive in 2010.

i was 24 when muxtape was happening, a few years past graduation and not really inside the english-language music-blog scene. muxtape lived in the part of the internet where mp3 blogs and brooklyn-loft-style indie aesthetics overlapped. that was a cultural strand i could see through twitter but not really live in from ankara. it was over before i would have signed up.

~ the dossier ~

~ the moment ~

muxtape worked because a mixtape was a recognizable cultural object that the web had not yet captured. last.fm tracked what you listened to. imeem had social playlists. neither of those felt like handing somebody a cassette. muxtape did, partly because the design was so spare that the file order was the entire content. people made mixtapes for moods and for breakups. the homepage of any given user looked like a hand-drawn cassette label rendered in css.

~ how the riaa got involved ~

muxtape never had licenses for the music people uploaded. ouellette later said he had been in talks with major labels, trying to negotiate something legal before the platform got too big. the riaa got tired of waiting and sent the takedown letter on august 17, 2008. the next day the site went black. the relaunch tried to flip the legal posture by only accepting music from artists who owned their own rights. the audience for that was a tiny fraction of the audience for "the radiohead mix my college roommate made me."

~ what it left ~

the muxtape interface lives on in spirit in spotify playlists and in every "listen along" feature streaming services keep trying to ship. none of them recover the specific feeling of a black page with a list of song titles you had to click through one at a time. the constraint was the feature. nobody has been able to ship it back, because nobody else can both have the licenses and accept the constraint at the same time.

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