Mother of God, is this the end of Muxtape?

[koganbot]

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

That's from muxtape's blog. However, the RIAA says: "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." People online are speculating that RIAA is going after muxtape for royalties, as if muxtape were an internet radio station, whereas muxtape is saying that it consists of user generated content, like YouTube, and will take stuff down any time there's a legitimate complaint but aren't responsible for paying royalties.

Question. Has any action by the RIAA or the major labels since filesharing started not been self-defeating, i.e., not resulted in more and more people sharing music files illegally in ever less traceable ways, with the record companies having less of a chance to get any profit from the practice? Well, I can think of a few, such as EMI deciding to let people buy duplicable 256 kbps files rather than unduplicable 128 kbps files, and record companies finally deciding to stream their videos on YouTube. But the overall strategy seems hopelessly bad, e.g., the original decision to sell only 128 kpbs files, and the decision to charge exorbitant royalties to Internet radio. The head of Pandora, which pays royalties, says he's near to pulling the plug, and I'm wondering, "If Pandora goes down, that helps the record companies how?"

Not that I would necessarily know what to do were I a record company.

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I wish there was a way to compare major to indie labels in terms of downloading -- my hunch is that the indie labels have used downloading in all sorts of positive ways, and have achieved record sales because of downloading, not in spite of it (i.e. a label like Merge outselling its former artists by a mile with an internet hype/heavily downloaded band like Arcade Fire). But I also would bet that major labels are much more affected by illegal downloading cutting into their sales than indies. To which I'd reply "fuck you, deal with it," but that's why they probably wouldn't listen to me.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I wonder if they will drum up a similar royalty deal as Youtube did with our lot? They'll need way more £££ of ad revenue, but the UK publishers seem happy with the Youtube deal as is. I dunno if the PPL side of things is drawing up a similar deal (that would be record labels and musicians getting £££ then, not publishers or songwriters) but it would be v interesting to see what effect this will have on websites primarily focused on music streaming (can't really name many others - Myspace, iMeem?).

I'm not being particularly coherent about this right now - I might do a separate post on it soon.