Large Legal Music Download Site Opens. CD Media Dead? End to Music Piracy?

**Broken** · 01-28-2008, 02:11 AM

If still true, then the value of Qtrax is about zero.
I guess it's wait and see.

**mbucari1** · 01-28-2008, 03:53 AM

Even if it is 100% free for an unlimited number of playbacks, it still has drm. That in itself will keep me going back to piracy.

For me to abandon my current sources and download music via a legal alternative, I would want the following...

1. NO DRM
2. High bitrate AAC, mp3 is old news
3. Open protocol so that the service could be implemented in the media player of my choice.

**limpdickkid** · 01-28-2008, 04:05 AM

I think its a bit scary. What if there plan is to kill off, or let die to be exact, the music piracy scene and once its dead they go back to the same old business. But like a lot of people said, even with this there will be resistance in acceptance, some people just like it the way it is now, and with the current restrictions it'll be a very difficult transition.

edit: hmmm.. I was thinking, what if the software is just a huge chunk of spyware, what if its tracking all our activity..that is also very plausible. They are known to use dirty tricks and this could be one of them.

**Broken** · 01-28-2008, 05:18 PM

Midem So when the going gets weird, the weird get ad-funded. Even in the short, strange history of digital music, they don't come weirder than Qtrax, a music service that launched here at Midem in Cannes today. It's a marriage of two desperate industries – the music business, and the ad-supported web startup. To steal a phrase from Sun's Scott McNealy, it's like watching two garbage trucks colliding.

So how weird is this?

Qtrax delivers an unlimited supply of free music to the web surfer, for them to keep, by scraping the Gnutella P2P network, sticking ads on the front end, filtering out the bogus files (that the IFPI and RIAA have put on the P2P networks in such abundance over the years), and wrapping the song files in DRM.

If that isn't surreal enough, the company pushed a bewildered looking James Blunt on stage with a broom to say how stealing from the sweat shop was wrong. And that he didn't really know much about what was going on – but he'd like to.

Qtrax is staffed by refugees from SpiralFrog, the clueless ad-supported web startup that was unveiled in a blaze of publicity but never quite launched properly – yet still managed to fork over $2m to Universal Music, the world's biggest record company, before it had made a single transaction. These business geniuses have now raised $30m from venture capital for their latest suicidal tilt at the market.

If you're going to fail, I guess, then fail hard and fast.

The company has pinched what it could from open source land. The fat client is a custom version of Firefox, with a fork of the Songbird music player layered on top. Normally software developers could expect a decent license fee from a $30m start-up for use of their work - but in the new Tim 2.0'Reilly "freetard" model, the Firefox and Songbird developers don't get a cent for their labour - merely the satisfaction that they're "building a platform".

The company also deploys MusicIP's filtering software to weed out noise (such as the junk tracks that contain pops and clicks) as well as unlicensed material such as The Beatles catalog.

Qtrax has plastered Cannes with saturation advertising. And it's won glowing plaudits from the visiting mainstream press.

The Times is enthusiastic: "After a decade fighting to stop illegal file-sharing, the music industry will give fans today what they have always wanted: an unlimited supply of free and legal songs," it writes. A credulous Wired report repeated the company's claim that the service offered 25m songs, whereas that's the theoretical size of the publishing catalog Qtrax has licensed. If there are only five songs on the Gnutella network that get past Qtrax filtering at any one time – then five songs is all you can get.

Reg readers will be able to spot the flaws in the plan, summarized for us by Dan Cryan of research firm Screen Digest:

"Free on its own is not enough," he told us. "It's an ad-funded model built around download an application, and that's a barrier to entry in itself."

The DRM ensures that music fans won't be able to take the music to go: it's tied to the host computer and the DRM collects play information to be beamed back to the mothership. The reporting isn't a deal breaker, but the incompatibility may well be. Qtrax said it's working on cracking Apple's FairPlay to allow iPod users to take the music and go.

Anyone who'd had to build an ad-supported business knows the pitfalls - if you don't have massive scale, you're competing with "a billion unwanted voices in real-time", as one reader memorably described Web 2.0. Jupiter's Mark Mulligan estimates that 100 clickthroughs are needed to generate rights holders enough to compensate them for the equivalent of one legal download through iTunes.

With a recession coming and bound to hit new entrants the hardest, we would advise Qtrax to burn through their VC money as fast as they possibly can.

source

Qtrax offline

p2pnet news | Music:- Qtrax, the malodorous DRM carrier which has the mainstream media all hot and bothered with claims that it’s THE legal corporate music service, having organised deals with Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, is coming unglued fast.

First, Warner Music said no such deal had been struck, then Universal and EMI followed suit, with Sony BMG not commenting.

Now the site is down.

Qtrax, loaded to the gills with DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) consumer control, says it’s free and legal.

‘Free’ means ad-supported, and ‘legal’ doesn’t mean anything.

“The service, tipped to become the world’s largest legal music store, legitimises the peer-to-peer networks which sparked the boom in music piracy in the 1990s by allowing computer users to share their music files online,” the Telegraph rhapsodises.

Riiiight. “Legitimises”.

“In return for unrestricted access to music files, users must endure a limited amount of advertising. So far Ford, Microsoft and McDonald’s have signed up to advertise,” the story says, quoting Qtrax boss Allan Klepfisz (right) as saying:

“It’s been a long trek to this point for peer-to-peer to find its place in a legal world.”

What a load of old bollocks.

===============

UPDATE @ 8:41 pm Pacific:

“Not a huge surprise at this point, but Sony-BMG doesn’t have a deal with free music service QTrax, says a person familiar with the situation, who says the two companies are in discussions,” says Peter Kafka in Silicon Alley Insider, going on:|

“For the record, that means that QTrax doesn’t have a deal with any of the four major music labels for the ad-supported, peer-to-peer download service it is debuting this morning.”

source