Backstage Pass

The futures of two popular ways for adventurous music-hunters to find new artists are now threatened.

Muxtape, the easy-to-use mixtape creator and sharer, took down the site yesterday saying they needed time to "sort out a problem with the RIAA."

Pandora, the Music Genome Project's streaming radio site, may fold because of the higher royalty rates for webcasters that the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board enacted last year. Thanks to lobbying from SoundExchange, an arm of the RIAA, the board doubled the rates, even though terrestrial radio doesn't pay any fees and satellite radio pays fees that are far less per song than webcasters are now being charged.

Pandora founder Tim Westergren told The Washington Post that the company will now pay 70 percent of its revenue to webcasting fees. "We're approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision," he said. "This is like a last stand for webcasting."

Maybe the thriving record industry feels it doesn't need all the help it can get introducing music fans to new artists. Oh. Wait. Hmm.