Slashdot Mirror
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 DMR free, and I intend to keep it that way :P
Monstar L
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.
(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 equally poorly written news-blogs from each other. Then when you have a dozen sources reporting on a story, more respectable places might pick up on it simply because there are so many sources, and they suddenly feel left behind. After all, with a dozen people reporting it, they can't all be wrong, right?* Sites like Reddit and Digg are based almost exclusively on headlines or blurbs, so people "vote them up" without reading the part about "no comment yet from the music industry".
2) In the "mainstream" media, there's not a lot of understanding of technology issues. They probably get a million press releases a day, and write about the ones that sound cool. A lot of them probably devote a column below the fold on the 3rd page of the technology section (or 5 minutes of a mid-day broadcast) to it. They don't understand it, but they need to fill time/space, and they have a peripheral comprehension that it might one day be a big deal. And services like the AP and Reuters write up a lot of stuff. They got a press release, found a few sources to back it up*, and then they had another technology story for subscribers to reuse. They probably took any "no comment" from the music industry as a "we don't comment before official launches" thing, or something.
* - This is a symptom of the rate at which information spreads on the Net. Normally, with multiple independent sources reporting something, it means they've down their own research. On the Internet, it may well mean they read the same blog and had different takes.
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.