Unstoppable
The suggestion Anthony makes is to open source muxtape: “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.”
This is interesting, quite, and maybe a great idea, but I think it ignores that part of the muxtape phenomenon may have less to do with functionality and more to do with design. Something about that design - it’s large font, the way songs load, the look and feel of muxtape pages etc. - feels nice to people, so they use it.
If that was missing - if it was just code, would it be the same, and be on the path to unstoppable? Maybe, maybe not.
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.
