Well, that was weird. A couple months ago, I (and everyone else on the Internets) discovered Muxtape.com, a website that lets you upload a free streaming playlist of up to 12 MP3s for the world to enjoy. Fun! I signed up, tossed six tunes that I was feeling at the time onto my page, and promptly got bored and forgot all about it. Then this afternoon, I got an alert that a new song had just been added to my muxtape — something called “Aim (with Stephen Jones) — Good Disease [Babybird does a Prince thing].” Uh, what? Actually, as I soon discovered, all six songs on my muxtape had somehow been replaced by this same tune (which I’d never heard in my life)… And before I could figure out which of my mischievous friends had guessed my password, I discovered that every single song on every muxtape out there was now “Aim (with Stephen Jones) — Good Disease [Babybird does a Prince thing]“! Even New Yorker critic Sasha Frere-Jones was bigging up this Aim guy.
Muxtape.com’s proprietors seem to have realized what was up pretty quickly. As I was writing this blog post, they took down the whole site and put up a terse message admitting that “someone gained access to our server and caused some problems”; a little while later, they added that “there are backups of the overwritten data and I anticipate most of it being restored successfully.” (Whew!) Anyway, looks like everybody’s muxtapes are out of commission for the time being. But what in the name of Babybird was that? I’m guessing this whole thing was the work of a hacker who really digs random British electronica from 2002 — sorta like a next-generation Rickroll. Or maybe Muxtape.com was just a brilliant viral scheme to popularize Aim (and Stephen Jones) all along, and this was the coup de grace? Pretty hilarious, either way.
So did this prank catch any of you by surprise, or am I the only one? And while we’re at it, what do you think of “Good Disease”? It’s embedded below, for all of you who missed its hour or so of muxtape glory. And I have to admit, it’s actually not half bad, in a loungey trip-hop kinda way…
I remember reading not too long ago about a virus that was spreading among P2P sites disguised as an MP3 file (I’m sorry I don’t have any reference for this offhand). When you attempted to play it, a message popped up advising you that you needed to install a special player, which in fact was just a malware program that would cause numerous amounts of pop-up ads to take over your screen. I gather from your post that Muxtape.com only lets you stream the MP3 files, so it’s probably unrelated, but that was the first thing that came to mind.
Oh, I noticed. Glad to see my mux isn’t gone forever though – although i do change it up every week.
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