Muxtape, the online version of the mixtape, seems to have taken a mysterious legal tumble.
This week the site, which hosts 12-song playlists uploaded by users, left a forlorn note in place of its normal content, saying: “Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA [Recording Industry Association of America].” On its Tumblr (a style of blog that piles narrow, lite-on-text posts on top of one another), Muxtape programmers claim there’ve been no complaints from recording artists and that they’ll soon return.
Pitchfork, perhaps grasping for the relevance it enjoyed in the early 00s, or just throwing a WTF wrench into the news, hypothesized that the shutdown could be a publicity grab by Muxtape, or a technical glitch.
But even if it’s resolved in a matter of hours, the affair points (yet again!) to the grey area of digital copyright law. Neither the RIAA nor Muxtape will comment on what the “problem” is, but the Internet is safely assuming there are licensing issues.
Does this spell the end of streaming audio online? (I actually need to know this, so an answer would be appreciated.)
Franchi fanatic
As the follow-up to his 2007 disco sensation, Cream, Italian club DJ Federico Franchi released a mix on his MySpace called Special Thanks. Its lyrics are a grocery list of DJs who played the aforementioned disco sensation (“Pete Tong played Cream…DJ Tiga played Cream…Rob Sheffield played Cream,” and on and on for five-plus minutes).
Unsurprisingly, Special Thanks hasn’t equalled Cream’s success. Neither have any of Franchi’s other MySpace songs. From every angle, Franchi looks like a one-MySpace-hit wonder.
And therein lies a modern-day music triumph: Franchi’s shortcomings are plain-as-pixels on his MySpace page, yet, remarkably, he still managed a hit.
With no video (he barely registers on Google, let alone YouTube), little promotion (a sample of the broken English from his bio: “He have used also to work with Roland for the creation of new sounds, patches”) and not a shred of sartorial style (he posts photos of himself wearing a black shirt with “FBI” in big yellow letters), Cream sold more than a million CDs worldwide.
Whether Franchi can duplicate the success of Cream is obvious from his MySpace page he can’t. Whether MySpace can produce another curious one-hit wonder like Franchi is the more worthwhile question.
Leak of the week
Of course Jay-Z and Oasis are still entangled in that wet-noodle feud from a month ago – they both have albums coming out. Champagne SuperHova’s song leaked last week, and this week Oasis unleashed two tracks, Shock of Lightening and Falling Down.
