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."

Comments

it sounds like the only thing Qtrax has

[thrillseeker]

is audio of a fat lady singing

Qtrax is a hoax to gather e-mail addresses

[lemmen]

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

I think all my music

[antifoidulus]

is DMR free, and I intend to keep it that way :P

Re:I think all my music

[morgan_greywolf]

Yeah, seriously, why DMR going around inserting himself into music anyway? Can't he just stick to his Plan 9 stuff?

Meanwhile

[phobos13013]

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....

It's as bad for the RIAA tahn QTRAX...

[Chabil Ha']

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.

Sketchy

[OneMHz]

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.

Re:Sketchy

[badasscat]

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.

Re:Sketchy

[ZachPruckowski]

(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.

Deal or No Deal

[PirateBlis]

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."

I'd like to be the first to say...

[MrNemesis]

...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.

I downloaded QTrax...

[PinchDuck]

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.

Re:I downloaded QTrax...

[68kmac]

They apparently licensed Songbird properly. So at least that bit isn't shady ...

Not Surprising

[BanjoBob]

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?

That sound you here...

[MattW]

is millions of bittorrent clients firing back up. Good work, record labels.

Re:Is it still relevant?

[absurdist]

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.

Re:No, this is a good thing

[default luser]

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 if this is any different from how the rest of the world works.

Radio stations that play your music make their money by - you guessed it - ADVERTISING! So do most television stations. While there are "viewer-supported" TV and radio stations, even these are guilty of weaving limited amounts of ads into their broadcasts.

Ads and music are hardly strangers. Of course, we as consumers get the opportunity to PAY to get to listen to your music whenever we want, without commercials. We currently have only three different tiers for the marketplace:

Tier 0: radio broadcasts, free.
Tier 1: pay-per-track via online purchasing, cheap.
Tier 2: full album purchases, either online or via CD. More expensive.

Are you telling me there's not room for another tier between 0 and 1, where people get to listen to music all they want in exchange for more invasive advertising and usage stat collection? I would personally like such a service, despite the fact that I buy dozens of CDs a year, because it's an opportunity to sample the album in high quality. To do this right now, you either have to break the law or put up with short clips / poor Youtube recordings.

And finally, if your band is so unique, I don't suppose you'd be proud enough of your work to tell us the damn name? I happen to enjoy prog rock.