Muxtape dies

Muxtape’s founder, in describing his meetings with various major record labels in an attempt to find a way to keep his site online, provided a beautiful illustration of precisely how schizophrenic the music business is these days:

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.

It’s a transparent negotiation strategy and a sign of corporate schizophrenia, all gathered around the one desk.

As it turned out, no agreement could be reached. Another Napster moment passes.

[Via kottke.org]