QTrax Round-Up

Well, all the buzz this weekend was QTrax, an online P2P music sharing/streaming/music-on-demand service that the Big 4 Major labels had signed off on and licensed their songs for.

The idea was the advertising would generate enough income for the labels to buy more hookers and blow be able to compensate the artists.

The idea intrigued me. I love me my iTunes, and have generally avoided anything that smelled of subscription services (renting songs? Why?), but this had me curious.

First step was to the site itself. I read little more than headlines about this service and I wanted to see how much I could learn from the site.

First bad sign -- I couldn't get in. The site constantly came back with server busy errors. Granted, this is Day One of the Big New Thing, but c'mon. If you can't handle the server load on Day One, it's not going to instill a ton of confidence in your potential users.

When I finally was able to see the site, everything checked out: no fees, downloadable MP3s, major artists, Mozilla browser. Not bad.

No Mac version. At least not until March.

Sigh.

I do have my trusty Toshiba laptop next to me, running its now archaic version of Windows 2000. Perhaps I'll still give this sucker a trial run.

Some questions lingered, so I started surfing the news sites. What were the reviews so far? Would downloads from this site work on an iPod?

ABCNews says yes in their story Sharing Service Offers iPod-Friendly Tracks. But two paragraphs in, the story got even more interesting:

Qtrax touted in a press release Sunday morning that it was the first Internet file-swapping service to be "fully embraced by the music industry," and boasted it would carry up to 30 million tracks from "all the major labels."

New York-based Warner Music undermined that claim, declaring in a statement that it "has not authorized the use of our content on Qtrax's recently announced service."

Universal Music Group and EMI Group PLC later confirmed they did not have licensing deals in place with Qtrax, noting discussions were still ongoing. A call to Sony BMG Music Entertainment was not immediately returned.

Uh-oh. A quick trip over to the "unofficial" blog (http://www.qtrax.blogspot.com) doesn't shed much light on the situation.

Electronista however, had a little more about the iPod claims and why that's not likely to happen either at Qtrax free music label, iPod support in doubt. So basically, the tracks will have DRM on them, meaning to live up to the claim of iPod supported MP3s, they either have to have cut a deal with Apple (unlikely), or hack the firmware in some way (which will just be patched by Apple in a firmware update).

And people wonder why I stick with iTunes.

In any case, the jury's still out, but it doesn't look good.

(Looks like CNet had the same problems I did)