Music Labels say No Deal with Qtrax

mikesd81 writes "Sunday we discussed apparently great news: a company announced making a deal with the major labels to provide DRM-free, ad-supported music. There's just one problem with that. Reuters reports that the Big 4 music labels have denied having any deal with Qtrax. Contrary to Qtrax's reports, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner had publicly denied that they had agreed to back the new Qtrax service. Universal Music, the largest of the group, said it also had not signed a deal for the new Qtrax service and is still in discussions. EMI Group said that while its song publishing unit has an agreement with Qtrax, its recorded music arm, EMI Music, does not. EMI Music, Sony BMG and Warner all previously had agreements with Qtrax, which was testing a paid music download service. Sources say those agreements expired in the last year and did not cover the new free, ad-supported model now being promoted by Qtrax. Qtrax did not immediately respond to further queries about its agreements with other companies."

it sounds like the only thing Qtrax has

is audio of a fat lady singing

Qtrax is a hoax to gather e-mail addresses

According to Dutch "shock-log" Geenstijl it seems the software is only being used to gather e-mail addresses and not downloading music. View the story at http://www.geenstijl.nl/mt/archieven/1181231.html [geenstijl.nl]

If it's too good to be true

As much as we'd love to see an uprising like this for "free" music or more directly fan supported. Sadly, this reminds me of hearing about early days of low key p2p software that's loaded with so much spyware that while you get "free" games/music/software

I think all my music

is DMR free, and I intend to keep it that way :P

Re:

Yeah, seriously, why DMR [bell-labs.com] going around inserting himself into music anyway? Can't he just stick to his Plan 9 stuff?

Meanwhile

Last.fm has... [blog.last.fm] so the floodgates may not have been opened, but they are letting the light shine through. Just enough to draw the masses... will they then slowly close back the doors and raise rates, or will they let us bask in the very limited glow? The current Last.fm deal is only a beta, once it's over, the music is only free for download or listen with a subscription. Meh, sadly even I can't complain at this point. I always said I would never pay for downloaded music, and to this day I have not, but perhaps its just too convenient and a good model to pass up. Especially with all the perks Last.fm provides....

It's as bad for the RIAA tahn QTRAX...

It seems to me that this is egg in the face of QTRAX, but quite telling of the recording industry as a whole. It seems that if they want to turn the proverbial ship around as far as their business model, it would seem that they would be willing to try a lot of new things, hoping to refine a business model to the point where they're making the profits they once enjoyed.

With the failures of all these 'attempts' to reach out to consumers, it seems to only weaken consumer's expectations of what a music experience should be. I think QTRAX failure is one equal, if not greater, to the failure of the industry to innovate.

Re:

For the time being, I'm going to operate under the assumption that it is not. It seems to me that if it were a scam, it would seem that the labels would have come out with stronger language than 'we don't have a contract with QTRAX'.

I would ere on the sid

Sketchy

This was either a move by Qtrax to generate a burst of ad revenue from an influx of users or they're trying to force the labels' hands by making the announcement. So, when the customers ask why the music isn't there, they're asking the labels, not Qtrax. Either way, it's sketchy.

Re:Sketchy

This was either a move by Qtrax to generate a burst of ad revenue from an influx of users or they're trying to force the labels' hands by making the announcement.

The real question in my mind is why nearly all of the mainstream press played along. QTrax obviously blasted out a press release, and without doing any fact-checking at all it seems like the story was reprinted on Reuters, the AP, CNN, MSNBC, the Drudge Report, and of course Slashdot, among others.

Not that media manipulation is anything new, but it is still a constant source of amazement to me when a company like this that is obviously just a big scam - not to mention nothing new even if it was real (anyone remember SpiralFrog?) - gets such immediate and widespread positive press among both mainstream and hardcore news outlets.

If you ask me, the news orgs have more egg on their face than QTrax does.

Re:

(This is a not a defense of the news media, who generally suck. This is an attempt to identify a problem) The problem is two-fold:

1) In Internet media, you want to be FIRST. Having "the scoop" or being "first on the scene" is what differentiates 3-5 e

Deal or No Deal

In a recent interview, Sony Spokesperson, Tom Luciano, had this to say: "We're not in any agreement or approval of Qtrax. Mainly because we have a similar product that we're already releasing to the public, aptly titled Rootkit."

Is it still relevant?

Seems like most of the music the labels own that's worth anything is decades old (Led Zep, Beatles, Stones, what have you). Anyone who likes that sort of thing has had 30 years of mixed tapes and 10 years of P2P to get the MP3 track they can play in their

Re:

Now c'mon here! Newer bands, like Fuel, 3 Days Grace, Breaking Benjamin, Disturbed....yup, they're boy bands alright.

Re:

Oh, please. Show me anyone current with the creativity and originality and just plain fucking weirdness of a Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, or Zoogz Rift who has a snowball's chance in hell of being signed by a major label in 2008.

Has anyone downloaded their software?

So, has anyone downloaded their software? Are they serving up content without an agreement with the music publishers? Or was the press announcement a big scam and there is no 'free' music?

I'd like to be the first to say...

...pump'n'dump, but someone's bound to have gotten there before me. How much do you bet this whole thing was planned from the start?

http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13526_1-9859255-27.html [cnet.com]

There's someone pimping the stock in the comments there. Oddly enough, the site he links to is an analyst firm with a front page consisting entirely of... Qtrax pimpage http://www.positionmakers.com/ [positionmakers.com]

Mmm, smell the astroturf.

Re:

Whoops, forgot the stock ticker link.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=BLLN.PK&t=5d [yahoo.com]

Does anyone who actually uses stocks know where you can find out who the key traders are/were?

I downloaded QTrax...

and was amazed to find that it was Songbird. And though the GPL was prominently acknowledged, there was also a part of the licensing agreement that says I won't distribute the downloaded client. I'm pretty sure that the stipulation is a violation of the GPL in the first place, in that you aren't allowed to place any downstream restrictions on GPL'd software. You can view their catalog, but you can't play it and can't download music. So they have no music, their client (as far as I can tell) is distributed using a license already in breach, and the only ad I ever saw was for a samsung telephone. Their server completely crapped out last night. Continuing their tactic of marketing one piece of software as another, the broken server claimed to be an Oracle web server, but the error message sure as hell looked like it was generated in Apache. Yeah, I know that the BSD license allows that, but it made me chuckle. I think QTrax is going to go away very soon.

Re:

They apparently licensed [slashdot.org] Songbird properly. So at least that bit isn't shady ...

Not Surprising

The big 4 labels ALL decided to pull the plug at the same time? Circumstantial? NOT. This is just another way that the labels and keep themselves and artists from making any money. How many billions of dollars has the music industry thrown away because they adamantly refuse to monetize music on the Internet? After all, it was a computer company -- Apple, that figured out the model and made it work. The music cartel had absolutely zero to do with that and, in fact, were the ones who tried to kill the entire idea. So, is anybody really surprised that they would try and kill this too?

The many posters who said it sounded fishy...

Many posters commented yesterday that the whole story didn't make sense... particularly the curious vague comments about Apple and iPods.

The many posters who said it sounded fishy were all correct!

Wow, that was some pump and slump

Look, their owning company's stock price hit almost 9 1/2 cents a share yesterday! [marketwatch.com]

That sound you here...

is millions of bittorrent clients firing back up. Good work, record labels.

Re:

Had they agreed to Qtrax's model, they would have effectively said that the music they provide has no direct value. It's only value would have been as a way to motivate people to view online ads.

As if this is any different from how the rest of the world wo