Today's New York
Times looked at QTrax, another attempt to establish ad-supported peer-to-peer distribution for free, legal music; it has deals with three of the four major label groups, and it originated as a rogue peer-to-peer company about four years ago. Coolfer
pretty much sums up our feelings on why QTrax is doomed—particularly his point about how the insistence on calling QTrax a "file-sharing service" is misleading at best, and outright deception at the worst. While QTrax runs through the Gnutella client, the file selection will be limited by participating labels, and the files themselves will be DRM'd up the wazoo (according to the story, most major-label acts will allow five "free" plays before routing the user to a purchase page). Anyway, we're sure that this splash will inspire a lot of chatter before the domain gets sold to a phone-card company or something in eighteen months' time; in the meantime, we're going to post an MP3 of the track we thought of every time we tried to write this item:
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Idolator
After a disastrous launch of a content-free version of its site that left its CEO sputtering and pundits giggling, the ad-supported music service QTrax is ready to try again, with a relaunch set for June 18. QTrax's initial launch was plagued by all of the major labels it trumpeted in its press release holding their content back from the service at the last minute; since then, EMI and Universal Music Group have signed their wares away to the site, although both labels have stipulated that their music has to be distributed through a method that's more traditional (and less BitTorrent-like) than QTrax's licensed peer-to-peer service. (Which should end well.) Anyway, I know it's a long shot, but I wonder if any budding entrepreneurs out there have taken away the lesson that they should focus less on the splashy launch parties and more on developing an actual product with their seed money. It's a hard lesson for dot-coms to learn—even in 2008, inexplicably—but it certainly makes the Google News hits a bit less ulcer-inducing. [Silicon Alley Insider]
Was the whole QTrax 
