EMI Launches Advertising-Supported P2P Service

SirClicksalot writes to tell us that EMI is launching the first ad-supported peer-to-peer music downloading service called Qtrax. With Qtrax users will have two tiers of membership available to them, which EMI hopes will draw in a large segment of users to try it out and graduate many of them to stay on with a monthly fee or purchase music permanently. From the article "In the ad-supported, free tier, users will be able to search the network for specific tracks, and those tracks registered with Qtrax will be made available for download in Qtrax's proprietary ".mpq" file format. Users will then be able to play the downloaded .mpq file in full-fidelity sound quality for a pre-defined number of times. Each time a consumer plays a track, the Qtrax player will also offer fans click-to-buy purchase options, as well as the opportunity to upgrade to a premium subscription service for a flat monthly fee."

Re:Not gonna work

[19061969]

Like Magnatune? [magnatune.com] ;)

Sorry to bang on about it and okay, I know the selection isn't the best but it's not bad at all. You can try entire albums before you buy, download in whatever format (MP3, OGG, WAV, Flac, etc), albums costs $6.00 each (you can pay more if you want), it doesn't need any proprietary player, the downloads work with any MP3 player.

Oh and you can give 3 copies of your download to friends legally. And the help is way better than anything else out there for music.

And yes, I do use it. In fact, it's the only place I get music these days because I'm tired of being treated like a potential criminal ("pirate") and paying for the privilege.

Re:iTunes FairPlay Vs Qtrax DRM

[Aceticon]

I'm not sure but I would wager that the "Premium" tier service for Qtrax operates in much the same way as iTunes

From the article itself:
"The premium subscription service tier uses Microsoft's Janus DRM technology, which allows consumers to pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to music in the Qtrax network. Subscribers will also have the ability to transfer content to Windows Media enabled portable devices for as long as the subscription stays active."

In other words: only supported by Windows Media portable players or Window itself, only plays as long as you pay your monthly fee, non-transferable to different formats.

As in, worse than iTunes.

Nothing to see here folks - just another showpiece online music store from the music industry so that they can show how "pirates are hurting even sales of music in digital format" while they lobby for wider copyright protection, mandatory DRM on everything and tougher penalties for non-commercial copyrigh infringement.

CDDA logo

[h2g2bob]

Always chack for the CDDA logo [wikipedia.org] when buying CDs, as if they follow the CDDA standard it won't b0rk up when playing on older players or your PC. Also disable autorun, unless you like their crap hidden in your PC.

h2g2bob

Re:iTunes FairPlay Vs Qtrax DRM

[c_forq]

iTunes allows you to burn to a CD, which is a differant format. Once on a CD you can rip it to any format you want (including unprotected ones). Not near exactly the same.

Re:No iPod compatability = dead.

[PrivateDonut]

You even read the article? "Subscribers will also have the ability to transfer content to Windows Media enabled portable devices for as long as the subscription stays active."

Re:That sure was fast...

[z0idberg]

Exactly.

I was once a victim of Sonys piece of crap ATRAC format and will never be caught out like that again.

Prior to moving overseas for an extended backpacking holiday followed up by living overseas for a while I purchased a SONY mp3 player. Like an idiot I converted all my (and my GFs) CDs to ATRAC format onto the player so we could listen to them while away as I wasnt going to bring all our CDs with us (approx 60-70 CDs).

So now living in another country I have a whole bunch of ATRAC files that I cant move to my computer or new IPODs and cant rip the CDs as they are in storage back home. REAL handy.

I have since "acquired" all these albums in mp3 format from "other sources" so now we can listen to all our music again. I only "acquired" the albums that we actually own back home, so will be interesting if the RIAA makes with the lawsuit seeing as I did actually purchase the albums, just want to actually be able to listen to them how I want.

Re:iTunes FairPlay Vs Qtrax DRM

[larkost]

Except that you can only use Windows, MacOS is excluded.

Re:CDDA logo

[Raistlin77]

Disabling Auto-Run:

1. Open My Computer
2. Right-click on your CD-Rom drive's icon
3. Click Properties
4. Go to the AutoPlay tab
5. Select Music CD from the content type dropdown
6. Select the radio button for "Select an action to perform"
7. Click on "Take no action" at the bottom of the list of actions
8. Click Apply/OK.

Do this for all content types for which you wish to disable the Autorun feature.

Re:CDDA logo

[Eq 7-2521]

Unfortunately, this only disables AutoPlay (another irritating "feature"). AutoRun is actually a completely separate thing, and disabling it requires a bit of registry-fu. Check out this page:
http://features.engadget.com/2004/06/29/how-to-tue sday-disable-autorun-on-windows/ [engadget.com]

Re:No iPod compatability = dead.

[bmarklein]

Whenever I see this objection to a new music service, I feel compelled to point out the reason for this. It's because Steve Jobs will not license Fairplay, Apple's DRM system, to any other company! Believe me, the major music services would all love to support the iPod, but Jobs wants an end-to-end monopoly on digital music. It's always amazing to me how Apple gets a free pass on this stuff, whereas if Microsoft pulled the same thing the blame would be put in the right place.

Re:Wait, so why should we get this?

[jZnat]

TCP is still on the transport level, so you can still snoop at the bottom half levels (network, data-link, physical). If they wrapped at the IP level, you still have the data-link and physical levels to snoop at. Nobody is going to successfully deprecate TCP/IP just to support some encrypted protocol that only helps DRM, so you'll always have a lower level to snoop network traffic at.