The Daily Swarm

Justin Ouellette says he honestly never saw it coming. A full-time coder for Vimeo.com, the 25-year-old wanted to update the age-old tradition of mixtapes and apply it to the Internet Era. So, in March of 2008, the University of Oregon college radio DJ launched personal project Muxtape.com with zero marketing or fanfare. But thanks to its stunningly minimal, intuitive design, Muxtape gathered more than 100,000 rabid users in its first month. If MySpace, Facebook and imeem were musical flea markets, Muxtape was a shining, white Mac store. It was also insanely illegal. Amid searing hot press attention, the big four music labels soon contacted Ouellette, who was liable for millions of dollars in copyright fines. In August of 2008—mid-licensing negotiations with Universal Music and its peers—the Record Industry Association of America independently shut Muxtape down. Ouellette vowed a comeback.

He relocated to Chinatown, Manhattan, took a crash course in copyright law, stripped out infringing content and this week launched Muxtape 2.0 for bands. Girl Talk, Of Montreal and Dan Deacon stream from the home page, and any band can have a Muxtape page in the near future. TheDailySwarm talks lawsuits, ugly design, and the cult of Steve Jobs with Muxtape’s Mixmaster:

TDS: MySpace Music is a monster, what’s going to make bands create a Muxtape profile?
Justin Ouellette: MySpace had a chance. They launched this huge music initiative and I was really curious. I was, like, ‘Oh man, I’m going to be really bummed out if they have something really decent for indie guys’. They didn’t do anything! They haven’t offered anything new for indie bands. I think their status as a music community is almost accidental. Their features just took off because there’s so many bands that needed it, but with no focus or direction or any kind of vision of what it would be for.

Yeah, but with imeem, Last FM, etc. the web music field is really crowded, what’ll make Muxtape stand out?
They all got very far away from focusing on music. The problem was, pre-Muxtape, there wasn’t something that was simple as a tape. The vessel for sharing all these things is riddled with ads and gives you this business model and bad design and were always very focused on ways to address the licensing issue, the legality issues, the tech issues. All the decisions for those sites revolved around solving those problems.

What I was trying to accomplish was a site that just seemed like music. You land on it and it’s impossible to get even one click away without being presented with a bunch of music to listen to versus something like imeem or even MySpace. It’s like, you go in there and if you’ve never see it before, it’s a cacophony.

So you’re like a MySpace as run by Apple?
We live in a culture where good design is being rewarded. Apple is a good example because Microsoft looks at them and they’re ten times the size of Apple and they have all this money and I think their R&D department is ten times the size of Apple— but Apple knows what it’s doing. You need to have someone accountable for these things and you can trace design back to Jobs, versus the design of MySpace or whatever, where the answer was, ‘It wasn’t designed’. I think Muxtape had addressed that in a huge way and a lot of people whether they knew it or not were just waiting for something that was better designed.

Muxtape 1.0 offered fans a novel way to make mixtapes, but Muxtape 2.0 is for bands. Go into your thinking a little.
I’ve talked to a lot of bands since starting this and they all kind of say the same things about what’s out there and a lot of of these band don’t feel satiated yet. They don’t feel awake. They’re kind of scrambling in the dark and they have to have this fifth member of their band—their web guy. Bands that don’t have it struggle and a lot of bands that do spend so much time with whoever is doing it.

All these pieces are on the web and even MySpace tries to put them together but I don’t think anyone has done a very good job yet and what Muxtape will definitely seek to be is a ‘take care of it’ kind of thing. If you’re a band, Muxtape will be the place to do all these things as a complete alternate to MySpace. Or if nothing else, as an alternative to having a web geek in your band.

Yeah, but how will you get a critical mass without people uploading any major label content anymore?
I think getting a critical mass is something I’m not really even striving for. I think MySpace is so big it’s a question of quality over quantity. Sure you can have tons and tons of friends, but what does it really mean? What’s your motivation for keeping track of these friends and bands on MySpace?

The online music industry seems to have this rule of ‘Ask for forgiveness, never permission’. What’s your take?
I went to a tech meet-up just a couple days after I launched it and people were coming up to me like, ‘You are going to get sued for one hundred million dollars. Why are you even trying?’ People asked me why I was even trying! That’s ridiculous. If no one ever tries, no one ever pushes the boundaries, nothing would ever happen.

I don’t think Muxtape had anything to apologize for. I will say I think if you have a great idea and you really believe in it and it’s kind of inevitable that you’re going to build it—the choice has been made. The sites we love and the ones that stick around are the ones where people took a chance, maybe in the face of a scary industry or an overpopulated market; and Muxtape is in both of those. When I was making it I knew I couldn’t just put it in a box. It turned out to be a great decision.