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Music Media Businesses The Internet The Almighty Buck

Music Labels say No Deal with Qtrax 58

Posted by Zonk from the so-close-and-yet-so-far dept.
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."
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Music Labels say No Deal with Qtrax More

Music Labels say No Deal with Qtrax

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  • it sounds like the only thing Qtrax has (Score:5, Funny)

    by thrillseeker ( 518224 ) on Tuesday January 29, 2008 @09:25AM (#22221044)
    is audio of a fat lady singing

  • Qtrax is a hoax to gather e-mail addresses (Score:4, Interesting)

    by lemmen ( 48986 ) on Tuesday January 29, 2008 @09:25AM (#22221060) Homepage
    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 [geenstijl.nl]
    • 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

    • Het leek te mooi om waar te zijn en dat is het ook. Gratis en legaal 25 miljoen muzieknummers downloaden, dankzij advertenties. De service van Qtrax werd met veel tam-tam aangekondigd, want Qtrax beweerde legaal bezig te zijn en contracten te hebben afgesloten met vier grote platen maatschappijen
      well that clears things up!
    • And just to prove I'm not all snark, Here's [google.com] a google translation of it.

  • I think all my music (Score:4, Insightful)

    by antifoidulus ( 807088 ) on Tuesday January 29, 2008 @09:28AM (#22221086) Homepage Journal
    is DMR free, and I intend to keep it that way :P

  • Meanwhile (Score:4, Interesting)

    by phobos13013 ( 813040 ) on Tuesday January 29, 2008 @09:30AM (#22221106)
    Last.fm has... [blog.last.fm] 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... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Chabil Ha' ( 875116 ) on Tuesday January 29, 2008 @09:31AM (#22221110)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      > I think QTRAX failure is one equal, if not greater, to the failure of the industry to innovate.

      Or just maybe it was a scam.

      Some people will take any allies, I guess.
      • For the time being, I'm going to operate under the assumption that it is not. It seems to me that if it were a scam, it would seem that the labels would have come out with stronger language than 'we don't have a contract with QTRAX'.

        I would ere on the side that QTRAX started blitzing before anything final had been secured.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by nomadic ( 141991 )
      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.

      True, but I don't think free, ad-supported music would be that business model. You just don't get the kind of revenue off advertising tha
    • 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

    • hoping to refine a business model to the point where they're making the profits they once enjoyed.

      The RIAA can never return to making the profits they once enjoyed. Even if piracy vanishes tomorrow, the shifts in the broader entertainment market in the last 8-10 years completely preclude that. They can no longer sell a $18 CD next to a $10 DVD. They can't sell crappy filler bundled with hits when customers can buy "just the hit singles" for $1 a pop. They can't go back to forcing people to "re-buy" music every few years. With production costs falling, they can no longer force bands to sign with

      • They can't go back to forcing people to "re-buy" music every few years.

        They never had it like that. It wasn't more often than once a decade, and most music isn't and wasn't worth rebuying anyway.

  • DMR free? (Score:1, Redundant)

    by Chapter80 ( 926879 )
    Hopefully, music will be DRM free, too, not just DMR free!

  • Sketchy (Score:4, Interesting)

    by OneMHz ( 1097105 ) on Tuesday January 29, 2008 @09:36AM (#22221166)
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by badasscat ( 563442 ) <basscadet75NO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Tuesday January 29, 2008 @09:42AM (#22221234)
      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: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ZachPruckowski ( 918562 )
        (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 p
      • 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 [news.com]

  • Deal or No Deal (Score:4, Funny)

    by PirateBlis ( 1208936 ) on Tuesday January 29, 2008 @09:39AM (#22221200)
    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'm shocked, shocked I tell you!

  • 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 t
    • Now c'mon here! Newer bands, like Fuel, 3 Days Grace, Breaking Benjamin, Disturbed....yup, they're boy bands alright.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by absurdist ( 758409 )
        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.
  • 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?

  • I'd like to be the first to say... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MrNemesis ( 587188 ) on Tuesday January 29, 2008 @10:08AM (#22221526) Homepage Journal
    ...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 [cnet.com]

    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/ [positionmakers.com]

    Mmm, smell the astroturf.

  • I downloaded QTrax... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PinchDuck ( 199974 ) on Tuesday January 29, 2008 @10:10AM (#22221536)
    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: (Score:3, Informative)

      by 68kmac ( 471061 )
      They apparently licensed [slashdot.org] Songbird properly. So at least that bit isn't shady ...
      • It's a licensed fork of a GPL project--unless the fork happened *before* the code was GPL'd, they don't get to restrict redistribution, and the owners of Songbird did not themselves have the right to let QTrax restrict redistribution.

  • Not Surprising (Score:4)

    by BanjoBob ( 686644 ) on Tuesday January 29, 2008 @10:44AM (#22221874) Homepage Journal
    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?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jrumney ( 197329 )

      The big 4 labels ALL decided to pull the plug at the same time?

      The way I understood things, there were never any plugs to pull. They didn't have the agreements in place that they claimed at launch. The claim of future iPod support when they'd based the whole system off WMA DRM should have tipped people off that perhaps there was less to Qtrax than met the eye.

  • 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!

  • Look, their owning company's stock price hit almost 9 1/2 cents a share yesterday! [marketwatch.com]
  • 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 erro

  • That sound you here... (Score:4)

    by MattW ( 97290 ) <matt@ender.com> on Tuesday January 29, 2008 @11:04AM (#22222098) Homepage
    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

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by default luser ( 529332 )
      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 broad
      • More invasive advertising? Collection of user data by a "questionable" third party?

        Isn't this exactly the sort of behavior we despise from companies?

      • Well, the only radio station that played our music is commercial free, but otherwise your points are valid. And yes, I see room between your tiers 0 and 1. Maybe my hangup about the whole thing was the way the original Qtrax articles were written. It seemed that they perceived music solely as a means to get people to view their online ads. But you're right - most media that would be willing to play/stream our music needs to generate revenue somehow.

        Nevertheless, from what I've seen, I still don't lik
        • Hey, sounds pretty good. Rush meets Shostakovitch meets Genesis, just as advertised. I picked up the album on CD Baby, this one is good enough to buy.

          I've noticed talk of a new album on your website dating back to 2005 (Prometheus has a 2001 release date on it). Is this going to be released soon? Also, do you play any live shows?
          • Hey, thanks for the support and kind words! Shostakovich is one of my favorite composers. His string quartets inspired some of the work on the new album. Speaking of, it is recorded, but we're waiting for technical issues to get resolved before we mix. We're probably looking at a May/June release.

  • 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 th
  • 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.
  • 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? [latimes.com]

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