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Muxtape went offline last week following a complaint by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which said that it did not have the necessary licences to stream the music from users’ playlists.

Now OpenTape promises to provide anyone running a web server with the tools to create their own playlist-based streaming service. And unlike Muxtape, the new services would not have to host any music themselves, making it much more difficult for the RIAA and others to close them down. Instead the software can point to music files hosted anywhere on the internet.

OpenTape’s origins are a mystery, but there are indications that Muxtape‘s founders may have had a hand in its development.

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They share a common publishing platform, Tumblr, and the code for OpenTape bears a resemblance to some of Muxtape’s source.

Should Opentape take off, the music industry could find itself pursuing dozens of websites, only to find others sprouting up all the time.

“It puts the record industry trade organisation in the position of having to play whack-a-mole as mixes pop up on numerous clone sites using the open source software,” as Valleywag notes.

In that, there are strong similarities to the situation that the industry found itself in following the closure of the original Napster file sharing service.

Legal action by record companies closed Napster in 2001. Like Muxtape, Napster hosted music files itself without the permission of rightsholders. But as its closure became inevitable, it was already being succeeded by p2p technologies such as FastTrack, which powered Kazaa, that enabled sharing without a centralised repository of files — users shared the music stored on their own computers. And the subsequent surge in music sharing has so far proved impossible to stem, despite the music industry’s legal and educational efforts.