Filed under: Portable Audio
You know what your mother always used to say about things that seem too good to be true, but the deafening amount of hype and hyperbole being thrown about in reference to the “game changing” Qtrax with “25 million tracks” is quite distracting enough to take note of. According to the Qtrax website, the P2P client — Windows only, a Mac version is slated for March 18th — will be available at midnight EST, but while Qtrax is confident of its supposed deals with the majors, a few of those labels claim to be short of an actual deal with Qtrax. The business model is simple enough: DRM’d tracks count the number of times they’re played and then report back to the mother ship — which will divvy up revenue based on ad sales. It sounds like there’s PlaysForSure under the hood, and Qtrax claims it’ll have an iPod-friendly version ready before too long, but there’s a disturbing lack of detail on the official site. There is $30 million of VC funding behind the venture, so they clearly expect some results, but $30 million and high hopes certainly is no guarantee of label support of a crazy — and perhaps entirely overdue — scheme like this. We’ll be certainly watching for what happens at midnight.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Read - Qtrax
Read - Times Online (It’s a go)
Read - NEWS.com.au (Labels back away)
Read - ZDNet UK (Rupert Goodwins weighs in)
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Source: Paul Miller
