Sharing mixtapes is an unstoppable idea. Muxtape is not.
I’ve been thinking more and more about controversial web services and how to make them unstoppable. Muxtape is one such service.
The underlying idea that Muxtape elegantly implements is to satisfy people’s desire to express and define themselves through the music they select. This idea is powerful and one that has resonated with the web for years (see MySpace, LiveJournal, Tumblr, etc). This idea is unstoppable. Regardless of what market leaders, music companies and anyone else does, people will want and find ways to do this. Blogging, peer to peer file sharing, email/IM are other examples of unstoppable ideas.
Muxtape the service, on the other hand, is not unstoppable. Once the novelty and excitement wears off from any new web product, everyone is faced with the same boring business questions (revenues?), and in the case of Muxtape, people in the music space also have a few extra questions.
Satisfying those extra questions may prove impossible for Muxtape, if they want to maintain their excellent user experience. Given that this is one of the core reasons Muxtape rocks, this can get tricky quickly.
The question becomes: How can Muxtape exist without compromising the experience they’ve created and still create value for everyone involved? How can Muxtape be unstoppable?
I see an easy, realistic answer: Muxtape should be open source. If Muxtape was the easiest + best open source web tool to share your own music taste via a mixtape, that would be unstoppable.
What’s in it for Muxtape, the service and business, if the source was released and activity decentralized? Plenty: they will be undisputed leaders in the space and will be able to define and develop it as they choose. There also won’t be anyone who can get them to stop.
I also hear people LOVE finding related mixtapes and discovering new ones their friends have uploaded. :) A site that indexed all open sourced Muxtape installs and offered extra value on top of that could be hugely valuable. Naturally, Muxtape, as the creators of the app, are best positioned to offer exactly this sort of service.
Will they?
