Muxtape: A parable for music & business in 2008

Published by boz at October 9, 2008 in music, opinion and the biznez. 0 Comments

I’m sure many of you may have heard of and used Muxtape. For those who haven’t, Muxtape is a place where you can easily upload a set of MP3’s to make an on-line mix-tape. This is an awesome way of spreading tracks you love to people you know and a way of making new friends who like your selections. It is all done with a super-simple and cool looking interface. A great and simple idea that is well done.

Now with all the kerfuffle around MP3’s, file sharing and the music business* you’d think, as many people do, that this websites premise of letting you upload any old MP3 for the world to hear is going to piss off some record companies and/or the RIAA, etc. As a user of Muxtape, I was always ready for the day when the site would be the target of a music industry takedown.

And indeed it was on 18 August this year.

What follows is the post that is currently on Muxtape.com from it’s creator Justin Ouellette about how and why this happened and what he’s been through with what he’s calling the “first phase” of Muxtape.

The post reads as a kind of parable for entrepreneurs and idealists who understand music and the internet. For those people who see the opportunities to create new systems of marketing and distribution. The industry response is both interesting and tedious. It shows how the lack of flexibility in the large music corporations is what is killing them - even if they want to move, their size and hunger will not let them.

* - an industrial revolution era business model which uses technology to capture & split music away from an audience. Profit is made by this division.

I love music. I believe that for people who love music, the desire to share it is innate and crucial for music itself. When we find a song we love, we beckon our friends over to the turntable, we loan them the CD, we turn up the car stereo, we put it on a mixtape. We do this because music makes us feel and we want someone else to feel it, too.

The story of Muxtape began when I had a weekly show at my university’s radio station in Oregon. In addition to keeping the station’s regular log I compiled my playlists into a web page, with each show represented by a simple block that corresponded to a cassette recording for that week. At the time, mixtapes were already well into their twilight, but long after my show ended I couldn’t stop thinking about how the playlist page served a similar purpose, and in many ways served it better. Like a mixtape, each playlist was a curated group that was greater than the sum of its parts. Unlike a mixtape, it wasn’t constrained by any physical boundaries of dissemination, but… it also didn’t contain any actual music. Someone might come across the page and smile knowingly at the songs they knew, but shifting the burden of actually compiling the mix to its intended listener defeated the purpose entirely.

Five years later, internet technology had advanced significantly. I was working on experimental user interfaces for web sites when I started thinking about that playlist page again, and ultimately set out to bring it to life. My desire to share music (in the mixtape sense) hadn’t gone anywhere, but the channels to do so were becoming extinct. Popular blogging services allow you to post audio files in an ephemeral sort of way, but it wasn’t the context I was looking for. A physical cassette tape in your hands has such an insistent aesthetic; just holding one makes you want to find a tape player to fulfill its destiny. My goal with Muxtape’s design was to translate some of that tactility into the digital world, to build a context around the music that gave it a little extra spark of life and made the holder anxious to listen.

The first version was a one-page supplement to my tumblr, and was more or less identical to what it would become later. The feedback was great, and the number one question rapidly became “can you make one for me, too?” At first I started thinking about ways I could package the source code, but the more I thought about it the more it seemed like massively wasted potential. Distributing the source would mean limiting access to the small niche of people who operate their own web server, whereas I wanted to make something that was accessible to anyone who loves music. The natural conclusion was a centralized service, which suddenly unfolded whole other dimensions of possibility for serendipitous music discovery. What seemed before like the hollow shell of a mixtape now seemed like its evolution. I knew I had to try building it. Three weeks of long nights later, I launched Muxtape.

It was successful very quickly. 8,685 users registered in the first 24 hours, 97,748 in the first month with 1.2 million unique visitors and a healthy growth rate. Lots of press. Rampant speculation. Tech rags either lauded it or declared it an instant failure. Everyone was excited. I was thrilled.

There was a popular misconception that Muxtape only survived because it was “flying under the radar,” and the moment the major labels found out about it it’d be shut down. In actuality, the labels and the RIAA read web sites like everyone else, and I heard from them both within a week or so. An RIAA notice arrived in triplicate, via email, registered mail, and FedEx overnight (with print and CD versions). They demanded that I take down six specific muxtapes they felt were infringing, so I did.

Around the same time I got a call from the VP of anti-piracy at one of the majors. After I picked up the phone his first words were, “Justin, I just have one question for you: where do I send the summons and complaint?” The conversation picked up from there. There was no summons, it was an intimidation tactic setting the tone for the business development meeting he was proposing, the true reason for the call. Around the same time another one of the big four’s business developers reached out to me, too.

I spent the next month listening. I talked to a lot of very smart lawyers and other people whose opinions on the matter I respected, trying to gain a consensus for Muxtape’s legality. The only consensus seemed to be that there was no consensus. I had two dozen slightly different opinions that ran the gamut from “Muxtape is 100% legal and you’re on solid ground,” to “Muxtape is a cesspool of piracy and I hope you’re ready for a hundred million dollar lawsuit and a stint at Riker’s.”

In the end, Muxtape’s legality was moot. I didn’t have any money to defend against a lawsuit, just or not, so the major labels had an ax over my head either way. I always told myself I’d remove any artist or label that contacted me and objected, no questions asked. Not a single one ever did. On the contrary, every artist I heard from was a fan of the site and excited about its possibilities. I got calls from the marketing departments of big labels whose corporate parents were supposed to be outraged, wanting to know how they get could their latest acts on the home page. Smaller labels wanted to feature their content in other creative ways. It seemed obvious Muxtape had value for listeners and artists alike.

In May I had my first meeting with a major label, Universal Music Group. I went alone and prepared myself for the worst, having spent the last decade toeing the indie party line that the big labels were hopelessly obstinate luddites with no idea what was good for them. I’m here to tell you now that the labels understand their business a lot better than most people suspect, although they each have their own surprisingly distinct personality when it comes to how they approach the future. The gentlemen I met at Universal were incredibly receptive and tactful; I didn’t have to sell them on why Muxtape was good for them, they knew it was cool and just wanted to get paid. I sympathized with that. I told them I needed some time to get a proposal together and we left things in limbo.

A few weeks later I had a meeting with EMI, the character of which was much different. I walked into a conference room and shook eight or nine hands, sitting down at a conference table with a phonebook-thick file labeled “Muxtape” laying on it. The people I met formed a semi-circle around me like a split brain, legal on one side and business development on the other. The meeting alternated between an intense grilling from the legal side (“you are a willful infringer and we are mere hours from shutting you down”) and an awkward discussion with the business side (“assuming we don’t shut you down, how do you see us working together?”). I asked for two weeks to make a proposal, they gave me two days.

I had to make a decision. As I saw it I had three options. The first was to just shut everything down, which I never really considered. The second was to ban major label content entirely, which might have solved the immediate crisis, but had two strong points against it. The first, most visibly, was that it would prevent people from using the majority of available music in their mixes. The second was that it did nothing to address the deeper questions surrounding ownership and usage for everyone else who wasn’t a major label: mid-size labels and independent artists who have just as fundamental a right to address how their content is used as a large corporation, even if they don’t carry quite as big a stick.

The third option was to approach a fully licensed model, which I had been edging toward since I met with Universal. I knew other licensed services so far had met with mixed success, but I also knew Muxtape was different and that it was at least worth exploring. The question about whether or not the labels saw value in it had been answered, the new question was how much it was going to cost.

It was June. I approached a Fifth Ave law firm about representing me in licensing negotiations with the major labels, and they took me on. Two weeks later I met with all four, flanked by lawyers this time, and started the slow process of working out a deal. The first round of terms were stiff and complex, but not nearly as bad as I’d imagined, and I managed to convince them that allowing Muxtape to continue to operate was in everyone’s best interest. Things were going well. I spent the next two months talking with investors, designing the next phases of the site itself, and supervising the negotiations. A big concern was getting a deal that took into consideration the fact that Muxtape wasn’t a straightforward on-demand service, and should pay accordingly less than a service that was. Another reason I liked the licensing option from the outset was that it seemed like an uncommon win-win; I didn’t want the ability to search and stream any song at any given notice, and they were reluctant to offer it (for the price, anyway). Muxtape’s unusual limitations were its strength in more ways than one.

The first red flag came in August. Up until then all the discussion had been about numbers, but as we closed in on an agreement the talk shifted to things like guaranteed placement and “marketing opportunities.” I was denied the possibility of releasing a mobile version of Muxtape. My flexibility was being constricted. I had been worried about Muxtape getting a fair deal, but my biggest concern all along was maintaing the integrity and experience of the site (one of the reasons I wanted to license in the first place). Now it wasn’t so simple; I had agreed to a variety of encroachments into Muxtape’s financials because I wanted to play ball, but giving up any kind of editorial or creative control was something I had a much harder time swallowing.

I was wrestling with this when, on August 15th, I received notice from Amazon Web Services (the platform that hosts Muxtape’s servers and files) that they had received a complaint from the RIAA. Per Amazon’s terms, I had one business day to remove an incredibly long list of songs or face having my servers shut down and data deleted. This came as a big surprise to me, as I’d been thinking that I hadn’t heard from the RIAA in a long time because I had an understanding with the labels. I had a panicked exchange of emails with Amazon, trying to explain that I was in the middle of a licensing deal, that I suspected it was a clerical error, and that I was doing everything I could to get someone to vouch for me on a summer Friday afternoon. My one business day extended over the weekend, and on Monday when I wasn’t able to produce the documentation Amazon wanted (or even get someone from the RIAA on the phone), the servers were shut down and I was locked out of the account. I moved the domain name to a new server with a short message and the very real expectation that I could get it sorted out. I still thought it was all just a big mistake. I was wrong.

Over the next week I learned a little more, mainly that the RIAA moves quite autonomously from their label parents and that the understanding I had with them didn’t necessarily carry over. I also learned that none of the labels were especially interested in helping me out, and from their perspective it had no bearing on the negotiations. I disagreed. The deals were still weeks or months away (an eternity on the internet) meaning that at best, Muxtape was going to be down until the end of year. There was also still the matter of how to pay for it; getting investment is hard enough in this volatile space even with a wildly successful and growing web site, it became an entirely different proposition with no web site at all.

And so I made one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever faced: I walked away from the licensing deals. They had become too complex for a site founded on simplicity, too restrictive and hostile to continue to innovate the way I wanted to. They’d already taken so much attention away from development that I started to question my own motivations. 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. As promised, the site is coming back, but not as you’ve known. I’m taking a feature that was in development in the early stages and making it the new central focus.

Muxtape is relaunching as a service exclusively for bands, offering an extremely powerful platform with unheard-of simplicity for artists to thrive on the internet. Musicians in 2008 without access to a full time web developer have few options when it comes to establishing themselves online, but their needs often revolve around a common set of problems. The new Muxtape will allow bands to upload their own music and offer an embeddable player that works anywhere on the web, in addition to the original muxtape format. Bands will be able to assemble an attractive profile with simple modules that enable optional functionality such as a calendar, photos, comments, downloads and sales, or anything else they need. The system has been built from the ground up to be extended infinitely and is wrapped in a template system that will be open to CSS designers. There will be more details soon. The beta is still private at the moment, but that will change in the coming weeks.

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.

Thank to you everyone who made Muxtape the incredible place it was in its first phase, it couldn’t have happened without your mixes. The industry will catch up some day, it pretty much has to.

Justin Ouellette
25 September 2008

Origin of the term, “wicked breaks”.

Published by boz at September 1, 2008 in videos. 0 Comments

via Noise Addicts

A couple of shows for May.

Published by boz at May 3, 2008 in byron elsewhere, dance, gigs and projects. 0 Comments

Just a short update on a couple of shows that I’m working on right now.

Firstly, is BlazeBlue OneLine which is a show that I designed the sound system for and also helped oversee the final stages of the sound design. The brain-child of Anthony Hamilton, this show mixes steet art and modern dance. I know that makes it sound a little like a community theatre outreach program, but this show is the furthest thing from it. Dancing with Anthony is Luke Smiles - these two guys are among the finest contemporary dancers in Australia right now - and this show is so packed full of unexpected moments and general awesomeness that you really have to see it to believe it. Now much time left however as this show is on tonight and tomorrow night at the ArtsHouse Meat Market in North Melbourne. Details here.

Secondly, I’m in the process of doing music and sound design for another ArtsHouse show called Get A Grip. This is a show that has been devised by the Trace Elements crew who are a diverse bunch guys that do “Parkour, Stunts, Performance, Athletics & Art”. This show mostly centers over Pakour and a huge scaffold set has been built inside the North Melbourne Town Hall for the show. Its shaping up to be quite a show and these guys can really move. The show also has a couple of films as part of it that are looking great. I’m working with old buds Nat Cursio (direction) and Jenny Hector. Find details on the show here - starts this coming Tuesday. This video below is from the development that trace elements did last year for ArtsHouse.

The broken music industry. Why a free anti-piracy DVD for schools won’t work.

Published by boz at April 30, 2008 in music, opinion and the biznez. 2 Comments

This is a website set up by MIPI “an organisation that provides investigative and intellectual property rights enforcement” along with the support of the major music labels & local industry body ARIA. It’s basically a video based on the old shtick where the artists all line up to cry poor about how music piracy is hurting them.

Included are Aussie acts like The Veronicas, who made a $AU 1.7 million profit last year & Human Nature with $AU 1.9 million for their trouble. These numbers come via the BRW Top 50 Entertainers list (subscription needed).

Even more mind-melting is the fact that this will be available on DVD free to high schools and available as a BitTorrent download! (BitTorrent is one place where you can access pirated music on the net.) From The Age newspaper article:

“The documentary is not yet part of a structured anti-piracy program in schools, but Heindl said it was formatted to fit neatly into existing units, such as the “Music for Free?” English unit created this year by the Commonwealth Department of Education, which examines the ethics of file sharing.”

I’m amazed that the artists are willing to line themselves up to peddle this tired crap - but then again if you’ve ever listened to some of these records, you’d know that many of these artists have made a career from recording their toilet activities and setting it to a dope beat with the help of a hot producer. To understand why this is just so much rubbish and how a free DVD of some confused artists won’t do anything to help, come with me now as we zoom out to take a bigger look at what is going on.

Music happened before there was an industry and it will happen after. Music is a timeless human expression that changes and occurs constantly. The ‘industry’ is new to music in this timescale and has sought to exploit a gap between artist and (a new) audience opened by technology. It did/does this in two ways:

Firstly, technology emerged (c.1888) that meant that a recording could be made of a musical performance. New technology is always expensive and subsequently this meant that very few people had the opportunity to record. Over time, many myths have been and continue to be built up about the recording process - most of them bogus. Most music business people have little understanding of this technology, so subsequently they subscribe to these myths (ie. an expensive recording studio is a better recording studio). These myths are handy when artists take them on, as require the continued participation of the music business to finance something that the artist can rarely do themselves.

Secondly, yet more technologies allowed these recordings to be reproduced, distributed and sold to many more people than before. Things like vinyl presses, trucks & trains, radio stations and so on were expensive and the music industry has paid for and subsequently controlled many aspects of the technology/money gap between artist and audience. The music industry belives that it created, paid for and therefore owns this audience - even if they used artists and their work as the front to do so. It’s important to note here that while they may have created an audience they did not create the audience. The audience is a cultural phenomenon. In music, an audience starts with the individual who creates a piece and goes out into the world.

As technology has moved on and closed this gap of its own volition, the music industry failed to see what was happening and is now broken. If some people did see this happening, there was little or nothing that could be done to stop it. Recording technology is cheap and prolific and is a massive industry in its own right. With more access to information (largely via the internet) recording myths are being debunked or becoming so outrageous that they are irrelevant. The recording industry lost this aspect of control about 20 years ago and was the beginning of the end for it. The internet has subsequently filled the distribution, marketing and sales gap once controlled by a few large companies. Without a gap to exploit, there can be and will be no music industry in the centrally controlled mass-market fashion we’ve become accustomed to.

This means that someday soon The Veronicas will be out there in the big wide world with just themselves, their music, some recording gear and a computer - just like the majority of people who make music today. All this film shows is a sad display of artists coming to terms with the fact that the industry they chose to be a part of is broken and without it, making a buck out of music will continue to require them to work hard with most likely, less reward.

So now we have some perspective - here’s a quick list of items for consideration for the crew of the SS. Australian Music Biz as their ship disappears under the waves, never to be see again:

  • Music will still get made, sold and enjoyed even if ARIA and all the major labels collapsed overnight.

  • The day after this happens the members of general public who have yet to ween themselves off commercial radio will realize that there is more music out there than ever before covering more styles, sounds, moods and ideas than you’ll ever have time for.
  • With their feed tube removed, radio stations may have to return to employing DJ’s who know & care about music. This would also mean that it will be easier for more bands to have access to more ears.
  • Music will be purchased directly (or more directly) from the artists, so while they may not sell as much, they’ll make the same, or maybe more money - as this article by Steve Albini demonstrates and also as recent releases by Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails indicate.
  • Performing will return as essential to any music career. Industry-made studio-built bands will get less attention without a show or a publicity machine.
  • Less cash and public prominence will lower the risk of artists developing fevered egos and becoming culturally disconnected and irrelevant. Bono and Sting will return to their true place in the world as “a couple of guys from those two bands”.
  • With less money recording will be stripped back to it’s essentials (a good recording of a good performance) as no one will be able to afford spending excessive time in the studio polishing turds.

Please big music industry, go someplace quiet and die to let the rest of us get on with making music for each other. We don’t need you anymore and we’re sorry you didn’t realise that you couldn’t own music. It’s a shame to have to watch you pass away without dignity - but this is the fate suffered by many a cheat. It’s not nice to think about all the artists you exploited and the ill fate that many suffered but we’ll recycle what’s left of you (and your market) to make something new. We promise to think of you when we play our copies Back In Black that we downloaded on our computers and remember the times when people “made records like that”.

The relevance of Art

Published by boz at April 25, 2008 in opinion. 8 Comments

The video below shows an experiment where,

“Klara.be did an experiment with (Danish painter) Luc Tuymans. What if you take art out of its usual context and expose it in the street?”.

It’s interesting little film with a result that was to me, unsurprising.

Does this video make a joke out of all of the curators and exhibitors who wax lyrical about Tuymans work? This was what struck me when I watched it the first time through, but the narration @ 6:42 was what really made me think twice;

“Hopefully, these numbers will wake people up. Can experiments like this one, help people to take more interest in art?”

This video sets out to do something interesting, yet fails due to its non-critical bias of the work of art chosen for the experiment. Most experiments would use a variety of tests to prove the hypothesis. Would the same thing happen to different artists? To video art? Sculpture? A sound installation? Something that interacts with the people passing by?

As much as this video attempts to convince us that people on the street lack an appreciation of great art, it also shows that the contemporary art world is blind to its own self righteous opinions. Could it be that regardless of the talk and the money surrounding Tuymans work, in the end it may not really be as good as the art world says it is? It could be said that for 96% of the people that walked past, Tuymans painting lacks the power to draw people to it and hold them in its expression? Maybe the narration could have read,

“Hopefully, these numbers will wake the contemporary art world up. Can experiments like this one, help the art elite to take more interest in the world.”

Using a web based app plus Live to make ambient music

Published by boz at April 23, 2008 in ableton live, gear, music, sound and technology. 0 Comments

This was going to start as a simple post about a neat little online music application that was sent to me by my brother-in-law’s wife but subsequently became something else.

This is the little app named Pianolina. Sitting on the Grotrian Pianos web site, I guess it’s a promotional tool. It’s a neat little generative music device that lets you play around with some piano sounds and come up with some neat stuff with not much effort. It’s the kind of thing you’d spend 5 minutes mucking around with and then move on to the next neat yet useless web thingy. It struck me however that using this little web could be used as a source for generating some ambient music using Ableton Live.

What I liked about this little piano music machine was that it had a really nice blend of both random and controlled elements which is good for generating some spontaneous and novel material. Kinda dull on its own after a while, but more interesting when processed and shaped. The screenshot above is of the set-up I used to make the piece below. The squares here were drifting around very slowly.

Here’s the result of my experiment, below. It took about an hour and a half to put together. (MP3/192k/11 meg)

Here is the Ableton Live project that I made to create this. Made with Live 7.0.3 using only stock effects plug-ins. It should run fine on most Intel-Macs.

I also used a neat little piece of software from Cycling 74 called SoundFlower. It’s a basic little utility that allows you to send audio between applications on a Mac. Very handy. In this case I was feeding the output of Firefox to Ableton Live which then processed the Grotrian Pianos flash-thingy’s output.

Neutrik XLR connector with embedded Swarovski Elements Crystals

Published by boz at April 9, 2008 in gear and technology. 0 Comments

Have a look at this:

This is not a joke - this is for real.

For those of you non-audio types this is can only be described as the audio electronics equivalent of having a set of jumper leads for your car that are gold dipped, covered in burberry and were hand assembled by only the freshest members of Kim Jong-Il’s pleasure squad.

I’m sure the crystals align the flow of energy that travels through the connector for optimal quality and purity of signal.

Makes sense, doesn’t it!?

Big thanks to Tall Phil P for putting me onto this.