The Qtrax site has a very sleek and modern Apple feel to it.
The Qtrax site has a very sleek and modern Apple feel to it.
Qtrax, which launched in the French city of Cannes on the weekend, is a music download service which claims to allow users to download music tracks entirely for free. The service let’s users download a hybrid P2P and browser tool, which they can use to browse the list of tracks available from the Qtrax database and also browse the Internet. Qtrax claims it aims to allow itself, and that of record companies, to profit through advertisements placed throughout the Qtrax P2P and browser application. A statement at the bottom of the site claims it has over 25 million songs on offer and during the promotion of Qtrax prior to the launch; they claimed they had partnered with music recording companies as large as Sony BMG, Universial, EMI and Warner.

 

Following their anticipated launch in Cannes on the weekend, however; it has since been revealed that not one of these record companies have struck a deal with Qtrax despite Qtrax managers having thrown over $500,000 into setting up the site and the application, which has yet to launch. The Qtrax front page, at the time of this post, claims that it’s music player will ship at midnight United States EST time. Despite this, Warner and Universal have revealed that they are currently in negotiations with Qtrax but as of yet, nothing had been finalized. In an interview with Alan Klepfisz, chief executive of Qtrax, he said that,

 

“We are not idiots. 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.”

Further backing up his claim and that of Qtrax he claimed that,

“We do have industry agreements including the major labels. Even today we are working on more deals,”

It remains to be seen if these deals do exist, with the actual launch of their download application at midnight.

 

If Qtrax does deliver what they promise, music lovers commenting on Qtrax are still skeptical of the quality of the music, believing that they are very low bitrate. There have been other sites such as Qtrax, but they offered their music not to download, but to stream live, and were also cluttered with advertisements. If Qtrax delivers what they promise, it will be the first of it’s kind to allow downloading the music file.

 

With the rise of high-speed Internet in the recent years, the music industry has been hampered by the BitTorrent protocol, which allows users to potentially share music files illegally, some recording labels have reportedly been considering the Qtrax method to help recover it’s mounting losses.


del.icio.us Digg Facebook reddit SlashDot StumbleUpon Technorati