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

[Broken]

http://i32.tinypic.com/2s785fa.jpgA REVOLUTIONARY online music service offering free song downloads will launch today.
Qtrax, a file-sharing site funded by advertisers and backed by the pop industry, will initially boast a five-million-song catalogue – similar to iTunes.

And its Melbourne pioneer said the plan is to eventually deliver about 25 million free songs to music lovers.

The site, launched in Cannes, France, with stars James Blunt and LL Cool J, is predicted to signal the death knell for CDs and a massive challenge to iTunes. "This will change music profoundly," Qtrax chief Allan Klepfisz said. "Once the genie is out of the bottle, the industry won't turn back. The time has come for free music."

Significantly, major record companies, which have traditionally sued file sharing or peer-to-peer (P2P) sites, support Qtrax. Qtrax has licensing agreements with the majors – EMI, SonyBMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group – allowing access to about five million songs.The same catalogue is on sale at the popular online music store, iTunes.

Mr Klepfisz, 52, has been working on Qtrax for eight years, initially in Melbourne and more recently in his New York base.
Artists and record labels were supporting Qtrax to stem a losing fight against stolen music, he said. And Qtrax would compensate artists unlike illegal music download sites, he said.

Record companies will get an equal split of advertising revenue and royalty fees it collects from Qtrax. A recent music industry report by Jupiter Research said for every song sold online, 100 were stolen. Ninety-four per cent of those online were unwilling to pay for music, the report added.

"I think the record companies realise their attempts to make up for lost sales are not working," Mr Klepfisz said. "The compact disc – as the main conveyer of mainstream music – is dead. So they need to look for alternatives. They need to see whether this vast mass of people can be brought into a legal arena and monetised with advertisers."

Mr Kelpfisz said punters were still willing to pay for concert tickets and merchandise. "But they are not willing to pay for music online," he said. "The idea of free music is not so radical. Commercial radio and free-to-air television is paid for by advertisers and available for free to consumers."

In the US, observers said Qtrax posed the first real threat to the Apple-owned iTunes. But Mr Klepfisz expects Qtrax will affect illegal P2P sites more and boost sales of iPods.
As the site expands it would add rare, unreleased and live concert recordings, he said. "We plan to have north of 25 million songs," Mr Klepfisz said.

Eagles star Don Henley and Annie Lennox have also been in talks to appear at today's launch.
Punters will be able to access free music after the launch at www.qtrax.com

The story is being carried by major news networks, ie below, CNN.
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More information on the thing...
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:source: Source: http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,23114989-5006301,00.html

[bornwithnoname]

The site is already down.

[Broken]

The site is already down.
I imagine it's getting slammed right now.
It did make CNN...


I would think this is bad news for itunes and napster. LOL.

[BurntBlue]

All I have to say is Holy Crap!

[1000possibleclaws]

i wonder what bitrates were offered on that site.. however i doubt even if this site goes through that private trackers will lose any activity. after all, pedros offers flac, and I'm sure alot of albums won't be on that site

[Broken]

i wonder what bitrates were offered on that site.. however i doubt even if this site goes through that private trackers will lose any activity. after all, pedros offers flac, and I'm sure alot of albums won't be on that site

It has gone through, the papers are all signed.
I must add, It's really about time. "They", never had a chance fighting piracy.


*Edit*
The web site's back up. Still running slow (due to load??).
They'll be allowing downloads again starting at mid-night EST.

[killuminati96]

wow...i never saw that coming haha..I don't like the idea of CD dying off totally tho. Sometimes I do like to buy albums buy artists I love. I want that full crisp digital audio uncompressed. They need to offer wave downloads along with an mp3 "VBR" option to fully replace CD for good. Maybe they could have a FLAC option too.

[ktasera]

From the New York Times:

Listeners will be able to hear songs a certain number of times — probably five in the case of most major label acts. If listeners like what they hear, they will be able to purchase those songs, much as they can on iTunes.

[Broken]

From the New York Times:

Listeners will be able to hear songs a certain number of times — probably five in the case of most major label acts. If listeners like what they hear, they will be able to purchase those songs, much as they can on iTunes.

I can't believe that from everything I have read.
Please link to source.

[ktasera]

Sorry, I should have done that in the first place. It is linked to on the Qtrax website under "press". Here is the article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/23/technology/23qtrax.html?ref=business

It is from last April, so maybe it is not accurate anymore, but a couple of the other press releases do mention limited playback.

[Broken]

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

[mbucari1]

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]

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]

http://www.p2pnet.net/images/qtrx.jpg

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 (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/27/midem_qtrax_launch/)






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 (http://www.p2pnet.net/story/14801)

[tusks]

Thanks but no thanks Qtrax. I'll be sticking to torrents, ftps, and newsgroups. And, yoump3.org forever :D

[aktiv8]

latest news on the BBC website saing no record label has signed up!

[slygamer]

wow did this all fall through so fast. DRM music :(

[ktasera]

Has anyone actually tried using this?

[slygamer]

its up! downloading now! will edit this post to tell you guys how it is.

[Hairbautt]

Please do.

[dnero73]

yeah i´m curious someone post how it is

[punki_rach]

yeah me too. Sounds kinda interesting but I doubt it'l stop me using torrents

[slygamer]

hmm well here we go:

I loaded it up and to my surprise the interface they have showed on their website is the basic layout, except that the search engine for music by band, artist, etc is not there. Very strange but it is in beta.

It came with bookmarks of mp3 search engine sites to dl music, which is full on mp3, i dont believe that it has drm, although it did not check the music yet. The downloads come from http sites in one the bookmark's. I did not see any P2P search engine like in Limewire, Bearshare, etc. like normal P2P clients have.

Music downloads pretty fast, and yea thats pretty much it for the beta at this point. If i find out more information about it i will let more people know.

I do not believe that they have the P2P part down yet, because the home page in the client is like a developer page. But will update more later.

[Broken]

Music file-share site Qtrax forced into humiliating U-turn

A website which promised to give music lovers the world's first legal file-sharing service was forced into a humiliating climbdown today after it emerged that the company had not secured the backing of the record industry.

Qtrax, a New York firm, unveiled its service with a glitzy £500,000 launch in Cannes at the weekend, hiring stars including James Blunt, LL Cool J.

Today it emerged that none of the four major labels had done deals with the site, putting a large dent in the promised catalogue of 25 million songs and prompting allegations that the site's founders had misled fans.

EMI, Warner, Sony BMG and Universal all confirmed that they had not agreed deals with Qtrax which would allow fans to download their music for free in return for being exposed to advertising on the site. Warner and Universal said that they were in negotiations with the site.

Qtrax's founders insisted that they had not misled fans, and that they would not have launched the service if they had not secured the backing of the industry. They admitted, however, that the "ink hadn't dried" on some of the deals.

Qtrax executives spent an estimated £500,000 at a music conference in Cannes trying to convince the industry that their site would allow labels to begin recovering the losses that have resulted from widespread illegal downloading and the subsequent decline in CD sales.

The site purports to work by allowing fans to download and own songs that they could play on their portable media players – for free – so long as they put up with a limited amount of advertising on the Qtrax site while searching for songs.

A spokesman for Universal, the largest of the labels, told Times Online today that it was "in discussion" with Qtrax, but that no agreement was in place. A source at Warner said: "Warner Music Group has not authorised the use of our content on Qtrax's recently announced service."

Both Sony BMG and EMI also confirmed to Times Online that Qtrax did not have the right to use their recorded music catalogue - contradicting a statement on Qtrax's site, which was down periodically during the morning because of 'overwhelming demand', that its users would have access to 25 million songs.

Questioned by The Times in Cannes today, Alan Klepfisz, Qtrax's flamboyant chief executive, insisted that he had not misled the industry or music fans.

"We are not idiots," he said."We wouldn’t have launched the service in front of the whole music industry unless we had secured its backing. We feel we have been unfairly crucified because a competitor tried to damage us. Everyone is very upset."

Mr Klepfisz's company put posters in Cannes claiming that the launch of the service would be the "second coming," and hired stars including James Blunt, LL Cool J and Don Henley of the Eagles for the event.

"We do have industry agreements including the major labels. Even today we are working on more deals," Mr Klepfisz said. He added that although "ink hadn't dried" on some of the deals, Qtrax still planned to deliver on its promises "within months."

The music industry has for a long time been flirting with the idea of delivering songs 'for free' via the internet and making money through advertising, but so far all the sites which offer such a service let listeners 'stream' songs, rather than download them.

The advantage of streaming – for the record labels – is that the user must be connected to the internet while they listen, meaning that ads can be delivered during the session. But most music players – including iPods – aren't yet connected to the internet, meaning such services have limited appeal.

Qtrax has said its users will be able to download songs – making it potentially much more user-friendly, but also more of a headache for the labels, who want to be able to closely monitor what users are listening to.

Qtrax users have to download software to use the service, and are also encouraged to 'dock' their music player with their computer every 30 days so that the service can ascertain which songs have been played.

The service, which uses Digital Rights Management software, is also hampered by the fact that it is not yet compatible with Apple's iPod, the market leader in portable media players. Qtrax has said an iPod-compatible version of its software will be available as soon as April.

source (http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3264556.ece)

[Hairbautt]

Read that last paragraph of Broken's post-quote.

The service, which uses Digital Rights Management software, is also hampered by the fact that it is not yet compatible with Apple's iPod, the market leader in portable media players. Qtrax has said an iPod-compatible version of its software will be available as soon as April.

:dry: Same ol' problem. It's just better that I control my own damn music file/library.

[Broken]

Yea, when I first came across this it was actually on the news.
I thought this was really going to be something ground breaking - Imagine, the record industry trying to work with people to get the the music they are gonna take anyways. Trying to get in on some of the millions (even billions?) they are losing.

All well, not in this life time.

[MediaSlayer]

hmm well here we go:

I loaded it up and to my surprise the interface they have showed on their website is the basic layout, except that the search engine for music by band, artist, etc is not there. Very strange but it is in beta.

It came with bookmarks of mp3 search engine sites to dl music, which is full on mp3, i dont believe that it has drm, although it did not check the music yet. The downloads come from http sites in one the bookmark's. I did not see any P2P search engine like in Limewire, Bearshare, etc. like normal P2P clients have.

Music downloads pretty fast, and yea thats pretty much it for the beta at this point. If i find out more information about it i will let more people know.

I do not believe that they have the P2P part down yet, because the home page in the client is like a developer page. But will update more later.

i toyed with it briefly, and wasn't able to dl anything successfully, it just said "error loading page". i did see where you are supposed to enter a username and password, perhaps that's why it didn't work. on their website they admit they aren't letting full account signup at the moment. i'll try again later, if anyone else wants to share their experience i'd like to hear.