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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."
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
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
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.
...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.