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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."
is audio of a fat lady singing
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
Daxy's Networking Blog
is DMR free, and I intend to keep it that way :P
Monstar L
Last.fm has... 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....
...and it should be known by now
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.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
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 you're losing all personal data.
Remember kids, in the English language, things can be spelled the same and mean different things. Track might mean music or may mean follow
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Hopefully, music will be DRM free, too, not just DMR free!
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.
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."
So... at best they said "we have deals with all the other labels, why not you [EMI/sony/whatever]?" to try and convince the particular label they were negotiating with to come onboard?
Yeah, I'd not even give them that much credit.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
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 iPod.
Anything newer than that is manufactured boy bands and Debbie Gibson ahem Tiffany ahem Britney Spears, the music that only a pre-pubescent teen can listen to.
Trouble is, the pre-pubescent teens are the ones who've been most alienated by the RIAA and the ones who are the heaviest users of P2P.
So the question is, does anyone still really care what the labels do anymore?
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
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?
...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
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/
Mmm, smell the astroturf.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
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.
I know its considered "in" to bash the RIAA or predict their impending doom but lets face it, they control the majority, if not super majority, or music. As such it isn't their ship that floats or sinks, they own the ocean. Its all the resellers who are ships on that ocean and its the RIAA who decides who sinks or swims.
Continuing on that analogy, indie music and bittorrent are below the surface, not nearly dangerous enough to threaten the commerce on the RIAA's sea. Yeah we like to talk as if thats not the case but it sucks that its true. Buying from iTunes simply feeds their coffers. Buying from Amazon is the same. Hell, buying products advertised on radio indirectly supports them.
They can afford the mistakes, you can't drown in the sea when you are the sea. Its the other parties experimenting who are threatened. Regardless of which takes off unless the RIAA and studios give up their rights theirs is the base from which everyone else comes from.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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?
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
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!
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Look, their owning company's stock price hit almost 9 1/2 cents a share yesterday!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
This is my experience, but I did figure out how to listen to music from the major labels using the q-trax application
1) Once I'd got Q-Trax running I try going to the home page using the home button
2) I get repeated errors but eventually get the qtrax page up with a search box
3) Search for something I want to listen to
4) More failures, but if I was persistent yenough and got a load of track titles with info, ratings and download buttons
5) find something you like and hit the download button
6) again more errors, but eventually I get to a page with more detailed track info and no download link
by now a good 20 minutes has passed and no music has been forthcoming
7) Open a new tab in the browser window
8) Type in 'http://www.imeem.com' and go to a site which actually has all the music I want to listen to (although I did need to have an imeem account)
If you don't have an imeem account but have a last.fm account you could always go there, but you'll have a smaller selection of tunes and a 3 stream limit, but even that beat the pants of Q-Trax right now
is millions of bittorrent clients firing back up. Good work, record labels.
I was horrified to read the initial articles about the major labels making deals with Qtrax. Granted, labels see music as nothing more than a way to entice the masses to buy product, but at least one of these products was the music itself. 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 a composer in a progressive rock band who has spent upwards of $30,000 of our own money to produce our latest album, the music of which took five years to write, 1 year to rehearse and 2 years to record (yes, the music is that intricate and difficult), I take offense to this perspective. This album means a great deal to me. As the writer, I feel that it's my greatest artistic achievement. I'd like to believe that it has some intrinsic value - maybe not to everyone, because I'm well aware that progressive rock is a niche market - but hopefully to some.
However, if the major labels allow their music to be downloaded for free, most people will come to expect that all music should be free, so long as they're willing to tolerate advertising. Despite the fact that my band will not be selling out in this fashion, people would still expect free downloads of our music. But how could we afford to do that? We would be stuck. Our only choices would be to allow our music to be used to sell advertising or quit producing music.
Given this scenario on a larger scale, the only new music we'll hear are from those artists who are willing to sell out to this extent. I don't know about you, but I have no interest in listening to such music.
The more I think about this, the more I conclude that it could never happen. Ad Supported Music cannot satiate the financial needs of Big Entertainment.
We already know that Big Entertainment is pissed at Jobs and they want competition. Amazon's DRM-FREE music should show that intention, or capitulation. I have heard many times that they HATE the 99c per track on iTunes. So I think this really might be about the money.
Feel free to point out any logical flaws here, but these are my calculations (All of them found by Googling a little bit):
1) A 30-second spot during the Super Bowl (2008) could go for as much as 2.6 million dollars on the high end. In 2006 there was an estimated 90.7 million people watching.
2) Based on that information, that is 86,666$ per second for 90.7 million people.
3) Lets just round that off to 86K for 100 million people.
4) We are talking about 8% of a PENNY per person per second.
5) Assume an average track length of 3 minutes, with banners all over the page and a 30 second delay for a video advertisement.
6) That would be approx. 7.8c per track that the advertisers are paying for. An additional 2.6c for the 30 second video advertisement.
Some more assumptions:
1) All of this is in Super Bowl commanded advertising prices. QTrax must present a venue as attractive to advertisers as that.
2) Big Entertainment gets 100% of the advertising dollars. Obviously not possible since QTrax would make no money at all, but lets work with that.
3) QTrax is no different than iTunes, in that a user can choose to listen to only a track, and not the full album.
Now I also realize that somebody may listen to a song more than once, but you can look at that as an additional track "purchased".
Does Big Entertainment make enough money at 10c per track to satisfy their desires for huge profits? I had heard, and cannot confirm anywhere with Google yet, that Big Entertainment got over 20 billion dollars in sales recently. If QTrax has to have each user listen to a track 10 times, assuming they would put up with the 30 second advertisements that long, to equal a single iTunes purchase can they deliver the profit?
Advertisers have other venues that are less expensive then this. I also wonder if QTrax could capture that much of the advertising market to deliver enough profit to Big Entertainment to keep them happy. After all, theoretically, somebody that is using QTrax is less motivated to purchase tracks through iTunes or Amazon since they have free playlists all day long. Which means QTrax could start eating into Amazon and iTunes sales. That assumes that people will flock to QTrax and LOVE the advertisements so much they will stay and listen all day long all the time.
I am seriously confused how QTrax is going to allow the songs to be downloaded to the iPod as well. How do you keep advertisements flowing on that device? The iPod is important, since people do not sit and listen to music all day long. They are on the move. QTrax is otherwise stationary.
The actual amount advertisers are going to pay could be a heck of lot less. I think I painted a rosy picture for QTrax. All in all, I must be missing something, or am I right that this kind of business model is doomed to fail?
Sure, who doesn't remember them? In fact, the former CEO is the primary consultant working with Qtrax according to the press release: http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9711371-7.html
From the webmaster, I want to make money side, I say that it was probably a very good stunt for Qtrax to do that. Think of all the damned money they made from 1 night of nobody being able to download music. If you try to download a song, it says downloads coming soon. That is when the server was up. But yet, the ads were still there. At one point there was 12,000+ people on this morning. I believe that out of that, there should have been quite a bit of commission to be made by Qtrax. Good publicity stunt. I may have to get in on that band wagon myself. ;P
Ignorance is bliss....Why am I miserable?
Stock price was up, big profits, big expectations, and great times for the board of qtrax. Everything was going fine until the labels piped up and said: "No wait, wtf are you saying Qtrax? We didn't agree to anything at all! Don't tell everyone we're with you." Then BAM. Stock prices fell like a fat guy whos cankles finally gave out. Only winners here are the insiders that sold their stocks before everything went down. Go qtrax for fraud http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-qtrax29jan29,1,6460500.story?ctrack=1&cset=true