Scrawled in Wax

Yesterday, new mixtape app “Muxtape” spread through the tech set like wildfire. The site is brilliant in its simplicity and, like Dropbox and Instapaper before it, Muxtape works because it does one thing in an uncluttered, intuitive fashion. To my mind, this is how web applications should work: take a cultural form like the mixtape, with all its (flirtatious?) connotations, and translate it to the web in a way that just ‘makes sense’. The mixtape especially seems to work well because of its twofold nature: on the one hand, it is a sort of gift that you give to someone you like; and on the other, it is a creative thing says something about its maker. And aren’t creating and sharing what this whole Web 2.0 schtick is supposed to be about? This, I imagine, was the reason Muxtape exploded the way it did.

Of course, many were quick to point out that putting up music online to stream for free is rife with legal issues, and more than a few bloggers and twitterers suggested that Muxtape, as great as it is, will be taken down before it has a chance to take off or ‘monetize’. This seems like a reasonable, if unfortunate, prediction. With a culture currently obsessed with the enforcement of intellectual property laws, it seems unlikely that Muxtape will be able to continue without some major changes and/or licensing deals. Either way, the transparent nature of Muxtape - that it is an agnostic tool - seems to be both its blessing and its curse.

This question - of how copyright either enables or restricts cultural expression - is both ubiquitous and tricky. After all, in some sense ‘copyright versus culture’ is a false dichotomy: the ideas that underpin copyright law - ownership, private property, accreditation and individualism - are cultural linchpins as much as they are legal ones. But Muxtape’s intuitiveness, the simple fact that it ‘just works’ in both a technical and a cultural sense, renders the question in a somewhat different light. Though the disjunct between content providers and users is clear to anyone who has ever heard of DRM, to what extent does Muxtape highlight the contradictory, even antagonistic relationship between intellectual property laws and what people actually want to do with media and art?

Yes of course, people need to make money and anti-DRM, anti-IP-law arguments often focus on this economic aspect - that in order to re-grow the music biz and recapture customers, companies need to start opening up. But what if, rather than only hampering growth, the current approach to media is one that stifles both the expression of culture and its capacity to affect the current political-economic model? Using Muxtape, one immediately gets a sense of how it might disseminate - of blog badges that read “Listen to my Muxtape” or the creativity that will ensue from a sort of playlist mashup (like Rex’s mix of Madonna, M.I.A. and Scarlett Johansson) - and the way in which it will become a mode of cultural expression. And to me, creativity lies in refashioning existing art and media to produce something new and yet not-new, its significance stemming from its ability to simultaneously speak to both the past and the future. Muxtape and other mixtapes apps seem to do this on the level of both technology and culture, the analogue tape now scattering through cyberspace. That the fervour for copyright may crush yet another new cultural mode, a new way of relating to one another - even if it is microscopic and, taken in isolation, insignificant -  seems far sadder than the legal and economic hand-wringing.

Oh btw, my Muxtape is over there on the right hand side of the page.