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Everything Means Nothing to MeMySpace Music lets you listen to pretty much every song ever recorded, and it still sucks.

By Farhad ManjooPosted Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008, at 4:42 PM ET

MySpace Music. Click image to expand.In March, a Web designer named Justin Ouellette created a brilliant music-sharing site called Muxtape. Ouellette took his inspiration from the past—the Nick Hornby era of cassette mix tapes, a time when countless lovelorn souls fancied themselves the curators of high-concept custom albums. These days we've moved on to mixing CDs, but Ouellette—like everyone else who's bemoaned the state of the recording industry during the last decade—saw that the Internet had much greater potential to broadcast our musical tastes. With Muxtape, Ouellette made sharing music over the Web much simpler than creating a physical mix tape: Just upload your MP3s to the site, name your mix, and send the link—an easy-to-remember URL, yourmix.muxtape.com—to all your pals.

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That, at least, was Ouellette's vision—and for five months, Muxtape was a sublime reality. But not surprisingly, on Aug. 15, Ouellette's hosting service received a copyright infringement notice from the Recording Industry Association of America. Last week, Ouellette published a lengthy account of his dealings with label executives during the past half-year. His story reveals that the music industry has a more nuanced take on upstart music-sharing sites than it did in the Napster era. Only some of the industry reps Ouellette spoke to threatened to shut him down immediately. The others wanted to discuss ways to license music to Muxtape—though at terms that Ouellette found onerous. Ouellette walked away from the talks; he says he's relaunching Muxtape as a place for bands to release music and manage relationships with their fans. As a simple mix-tape service, Muxtape is no more.

I began to realize how much of a shame that is as I tested MySpace Music this week. Industry observers are calling the service—a joint project between MySpace and four major record labels that allows people to stream millions of songs online for free—a "breakthrough," though that term only highlights the industry's history of intransigence. Sure, it's nice that the music industry has finally found a way to give us free music while also compensating artists. (They'll get a share of the revenue the site generates from advertising.) But while the site may represent a breakthrough in business negotiations, it doesn't offer much that other online music services (both legal and illegal) haven't offered before. As I struggled to navigate its cluttered user interface, I thought fondly of dearly departed sites like Muxtape—services that weren't authorized by the industry but that succeeded because they offered a better experience than anything music executives have yet cooked up.

MySpace Music does indeed let you listen to a huge number of songs through the Web. I found its catalog extensive—I was able to listen to most songs that I searched for within a few seconds of typing their names—but not complete. For instance, while I dug up a somewhat obscure Greek song (Stelios Kazantzidis' "Efuge Efuge," used in a memorable scene in Season 2 of The Wire), there were only a handful of tracks available from the new Jenny Lewis album. While MySpace Music may come in handy while you're at work or DJing a party, creating a streaming playlist from a huge catalog of songs isn't completely novel. At least two other industry-licensed music sites—Imeem and Last.fm—have offered the same service since last year; they, too, feature lots of songs but also many omissions. And none of these sites beat the simple, fast-loading user interface of YouTube, which remains the best place to search if you feel a sudden need to hear a song you don't have.

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Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and the author of True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society.
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