Free & Legal P2P service Qtrax launches - almost
As of Midnight 28th January EST or 5 in the morning here in the UK on the 29th January, the Qtrax beta became available for download from http://www.qtrax.com/ . This new service promised free downloads via a legal peer to peer network funded by advertising. Qtrack announced that they had signed deals with all major record labels - a claim the record labels quickly denied. Turns out that discussions were underway but nothing had yet been agreed.
The player and download tool is a modified version of the Mozilla Foundation’s free and open source Songbird music player software. It seems nice enough although within the first few hours of launching it crashed many times and was not able to reach the Qtrax servers.
The biggest problem though is that you can not actually download music. The Qtrax web site now announces proudly that the high levels of demand have left them with some technical issues they are ironing out (which I suggest means having problems with the record labels they claimed to have deals in place with).
It is a shame because the prospect of advertising supported free music is an interesting new development as companies look for new ways to differentiate themselves to become our digital media providers of choice.
The Qtrax offer sounded too good to be true. Turns out it really may be.
We will keep an eye on this to see if the service does eventually get off the ground.
Matt S
