The Times reported today a news story claiming a new service, Qtrax, would allow users to download 25 million music tracks for free on an advertising sponsored basis, with full backing from all four major music labels.

With CD sales in free fall and legal downloads yet to fill the gap, the music industry has reluctantly embraced the file-sharing technology that threatened to destroy it. Qtrax, a digital service announced today, promises a catalogue of more than 25 million songs that users can download to keep, free and with no limit on the number of tracks.

They further report

The service has been endorsed by the very same record companies - including EMI, Universal Music and Warner Music – that have chased file-sharers through the courts in a doomed attempt to prevent piracy.

Further investigation shows that all is not quite what it seems. Other reports, notably from the BBC, indicate that the major labels have not in fact licensed this service after all.

The Register details further information on how this is supposed to work. Rather than having their own pristine database of 25 million tracks, it would seem the Qtrax client is in fact a front end onto the peer to peer filesharing network Gnutella, filtering out bogus files, applying DRM to the resulting tracks and slapping adverts in place when you listen to them. They also claim the client is in fact comprised of open source software, a heavily customised version of the Mozilla Firefox browser and the Songbird music player, (I’ll no doubt talk a lot more about Songbird once it becomes a tad more stable.)

The basic principle seems to be this: millions of music tracks are already available via P2P networks, and neither the threat of litigation or technological solutions appear to be able to stop this. So by legitimising the download and use of these tracks through the use of advertising, the music industry and artists can begin to make some money back from file sharing. The Gnutella network already exists and is populated with tracks so no expensive infrastructure needs to be built. End result - everyone happy?

I think this is an audacious move by Qtrax. Qtrax seem to have been around for a while as the wayback machine shows , though I’ve not heard of them before. I have now though, and so have many readers of the BBC, The Times etc.

Large scale media coverage has been guaranteed through the (perhaps premature) announcement at the Midem conference in Cannes of the sign up of the major labels. If they are in negotiation with the labels, this may help provide extra pressure to finalise those deals. Either way, they’ve now gained a great deal of attention. One thing is definite though – at time of writing, the software client is unavailable, and no songs have been downloaded or adverts served.
So is Qtrax just a pie in the sky idea or are big big changes afoot? Watch this space, but my prediction is pie.

Meanwhile Amazon have announced that their DRM free music store will extend beyond the borders of the US into the rest of the world. This I think is going to be hugely successful, and will likely force the iTunes Music Store to follow suit.

Header image: Adrià García

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