For years now, the Recording Industry Association of America has been battling with music fans over illegal distribution and royalties. A few of my friends from Drexel were sued in 2005 over illegal downloading. I’m sure at some point in your life you’ve heard about how evil these assholes are.

Last week, the Washington Post ran a story about Pandora Radio and how increasing royalty fees might force the service to shutdown. Basically, conventional FM radio stations pay no royalties at all per song due to the fact that they are owned by giant corporations who own rights to the songs anyway. XM/Sirius radio pays about 6% of their revenues to SoundExchange (the RIAA’s copyright royalty arm) and Internet radio pays an exorbitantly higher amount per song, per listener. Why do webcasts pay so much more? It’s politics.

Both FM radio stations and XM/Sirius pay lobbyists to pull weight around in D.C. Currently SoundExchange is fighting to charge royalties to traditional radio and increase those paid by satellite. Pandora’s founder Tim Westergren not only strongly disagrees with the fees charge but admits that the company just won’t survive as rates increase.

If the news about Pandora wasn’t hard hitting enough, another favorite site of music enthusiasts, Muxtape was recently shutdown by the RIAA this week. I wrote about Muxtape when the site first launched, but the basic gist is a service that lets users upload MP3s and arrange them as a web 2.0 mixtape to share with friends. Controversy started to surround the site the site when a developer released a Greasemonkey plugin for Firefox that allowed you to download songs from anyone’s Muxtape - music piracy at it’s finest. The RIAA obviously wasn’t happy and currently the site has been shutdown with the message: “Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.”

As expected, fans aren’t taking this without a fight. Just launched today, Opentape is a self-hosted verison of Muxtape. Simply download the files, upload to your webserver with your MP3s and you’re ready to go. You can check out a completely random sampling of music I’ve recently downloaded in my mixtape here. Another site, I <3 Pandora has created a widget to place on your site or blog to get the word out and unite people to help out the service.

With the current state of the industry it seems that issues surrounding music rights, distribution and piracy will be a controversial and debated topic for a long time to come. I clearly believe that artists deserve royalties and acknowledgment for their work, but the RIAA and SoundExchange are simply asking too much. Music is a fundamental part of life, it inspires and moves us, and most importantly it brings us together. Raising restrictions, removing DRM and allowing people to enjoy their music instead of fighting them over it will make legal purchasing and downloading that much more appealing.

Electro/hipster/indie/rock is the only way I could really think of to describe Ratatat, the genius duo of Mike Stroud and Evan Mast. There’s a good chance that if you haven’t heard of them you might of heard the track Tropicana in the movie Knocked Up during the time lapse pregnancy montages.

Their newest release LP3 is more laid back then ever with a very loungey groove throughout. No worries though, there are some definite breakout tracks on here. Instead of going into a review, why not listen for yourself? I posted all the even tracks of the album on my Muxtape. Why only the even tracks? Because I want you to be encouraged to purchase it and support these indie musicians.

Just updated my Muxtape with tracks I’ve been listening to recently. Notable tracks are “Pity and Fear” off the new Death Cab for Cutie album and “Echoplex” from Nine Inch Nail’s latest free album The Spin which was released last night. Also sprinkled in a few tracks from Ghostly Swim which I wrote about recently.

The full tracklist:

• Nine Inch Nails - “Echoplex”
• Michna - “Triple Chrome Dipped”
• Death Cab for Cutie - “Pity and Fear”
• The Beta Band - “Number 15″
• Santogold - “Lights Out”
• MSTRKRFT - “Easy Love”
• The Roots - Criminal
• Ben Benjamin - “Squirmy Sign Language”
• Mux Cool - “Night Court”
• Cut Copy - “Nobody Lost, Nobody Found”
• MGMT - “Kids”
• Vampire Weekend - “Exit Music (For a Film)”

Muxtape is a simple, easy to use, social way to share your mixtape with friends. I found out about it a few minutes ago from Jakob Lodwick’s tumblr. Muxtape’s creator Justin Oullette writes, “My goal is nothing short of changing the way we consume, distribute, and discover music.”

You can upload 12 MP3s (which is a surprisingly fast process) then organize them by dragging and dropping. The interface for playing tracks looks like it plays nice on the iPhone and other mobile devices too. I threw together a quick Muxtape of songs I’ve been listening to recently. Check it out.