P2P music networking site Qtrax launched over the weekend promising anyone the ability to download legal copies of over 25 million songs for free. Instead of having to cough up cash to download songs advertising would cover the cost of music. Revenues would be split with Qtrax and record labels. However, things aren't looking good for the fledgling service, as of Monday morning the site is unavailable and several big music labels are claiming not to be supporting the service, according to reports.
Originally Qtrax launched claiming to have over 25 million songs, with support from EMI, Universal, and Warner. Now all three major labels are saying that while they were in discussion with Qtrax, no formal agreement had ever been made. This severely limits the availability of music through Qtrax, and is the suspected reason for the site's current inaccessibility.
What this means for the recently announced Yahoo music service (which some say will be ad supported) is still to be seen. The Yahoo service, as recently reported, would be ad-funded similarly to Qtrax. It has not yet been made clear if the Yahoo service will be streaming music or if it will provide the ability to download the music.
An existing ad-supported download service called SpiralFrog currently exists. Its music downloads are "free" so long as you are an active user of the service. SpiralFrog memberships are free. If you do not maintain an active membership DRM embedded in song tracks makes them expire or become un-playable.
If Yahoo provides streaming music, then I doubt there will be a problem. If people are required to stream music from a website, then ads are guaranteed to appear every time the song is played. That's all it comes down to; music labels want to be ensured that they?ll be making money for providing their songs to these ad-funded services. And as long as I'm not the one that has to pay for it, I really can't complain.
