Just got an email from Mixwit, a service to make mixtapes of tracks that are already online via Seeqpod and other services, and share them (not the tracks, just streamed via Flash) I’ve used and hope to use in future – they’re closing at the end of the year, for unspecified reasons:
“I won’t go into the details of our situation but state simply that we boldly marched into in a position best described as “between a rock and a hard place.”
Which to anyone used to reading between the lines and seeing little music industry cockroaches sunning themselves there – can mean one thing: RIAA or some other body has gotten to them.
As Techcrunch points out, when will these industries ‘get it’? Mixwit was no Napster – you couldn’t download the tracks, it harked back to a more innocent time with cassette tapes made for friends, yes, but unlike those tapes (for which the laughable campaign and tape skull and crossbones logo that PirateBay is now using was created for – ‘Taping is Killing Music – and it’s a CRIME!’) you couldn’t take the tracks away, only maybe embed the little Flash device somewhere.
The tracks weren’t uploaded to their servers, no-one got any tracks they shouldn’t have, and users got to interact with music in a new(ish) way…so of course it got canned – it’s like the industry doesn’t want people to share and learn about new music – I’ve bought many albums and gone to live gigs off something originally heard on some crappy D90; ditto P2P and torrents; and sites like Hype Machine, or blip.fm who similarly has had a fatwa on their service.
So news at 11: Record Industry STILL doesn’t get it, music sharing (even just hearing the track) IS not a crime (it’s why Myspace is so big, and Youtube) and actually helps them in the long run, because people want to hear music that others recommend. Not limited by catalog or label or genre or the poor scrappy handouts from artists and labels, no the tracks they love. Love and will buy if they get reminded or exposed to them, rather than what dross some corporate marketing board is pushing this week.
And if they were wise enough to support and harness that, like Pandora (closed to the UK for many years) they’d have a massive database of what tracks people like, and what maybe they should release…but no, Father Knows Best apparently.
See you all down at the Woolworths Bargain Bin then….oh.
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