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Qtrax, what the?

When the news broke, many consumers were somewhat astounded that they may never have to pay for music again.

According to initial reports, Qtrax was a bold new venture that would allow people to download a wide range of music for free -- the only "gotcha" being that an ad would play before each track, every time it was listened to.

Some were obviously unimpressed by this concept, claiming that it would never work, the true "cost" of such downloads being too high because ads were irritating.

However, when you look at just how many people endure endless ads on commercial radio, just to catch a little music it must be acknowledged that there would likely be plenty of takers for such a service.

Qtrax went on to say that it had deals with the "big four" major music labels, something that would ensure the service offered access to the latest and greatest tracks.

And that's when the wheels fell off Qtrax's cart.

Very quickly, the music publishers moved to distance themselves from the claims being made by Qtrax.

In response, Qtrax also backed away from earlier claims and said that it was really only "in negotiation" with those labels -- a claim that also now seems to be of dubious veracity.

So why would they tell such wild porkies?

Well odds are that it's a chicken and egg thing.

The concept is pretty sound... the recording companies provide the music and get paid every time an ad is played alongside their wares.

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Now it stands to reason that Qtrax would have a lot more bargaining power and be far more likely to come away with a good deal if they could front up to the negotiating table with a long list of high-quality advertisers who were already signed up.

But, it's unlikely they'd get any big-spend advertisers unless they claimed they already had already done a deal to get the music.

So odds are they took a chance that the advertisers would sign up before the recording companies refuted their claims of having the music in the bag.

A risky decision of dubious ethics -- and it seems to have failed in a rather embarrassing way, leaving Qtrax with egg all over its face and its credibility shot to hell.

Oh dear, never mind.

However, despite the claims of some, I really don't think this is an idea that would have flown anyway.

For a start, if the music were provided in a format where the ads were permanently tagged to the tracks then a special player would be required -- significantly limiting their appeal and restricting them to PC-based use.

If the tracks were supplied in an industry-standard format, it would take about 30 seconds for the first person who downloaded them to strip out the ads and burn them to CD/DVD -- how's that going to make money for anyone?

Quite frankly (and despite the claims of some), the recording industry is now "doing very nicely thank you", since they finally realised that there's more money to be made by providing legal downloads than by trying to kill the whole download concept.

Why would they want to kill their own paid download business to take a punt on some ad-funded system that could never be successfully implemented on the technology we currently have?

Hell, the recording industry is even waking up to smell the coffee of non-DRMed downloads and the market is warming to their commonsense.

Sorry, but if you want ads with your music, just tune in to your favourite FM radio station and record the broadcast to your PC. If ads aren't your bag then edit out the ads with any number of free audio-edit programs and save the result as an MP3 or Ogg file.

Or maybe an even better source of the latest tracks are the numerous music vids that screen so frequently on C4 and other channels. Grab the videos with a suitable card, rip the audio tracks to MP3 and burn/save to your heart's content. NICAM stereo is not too bad when it comes to fidelity and much of this contemporary music is already compressed to hell and back so the quality of tracks obtained this way won't fall much short of a store-bought CD or official download.

Unfortunately all of this is illegal of course and I really think we ought to reward the music industry for finally running out of feet to shoot -- so why not just go out and buy the damned stuff?

If they're making your favourite music available in DRM-free digital download format then part with some of your hard-earned cash and use that service. Remember -- reward the behaviour you want to promote, ignore that you want to discourage.

But I still think you're best to spend an evening or two just exploring the mountain of indie releases that are available straight from the army of musicians who have decided to self-publish through the Net. Sure, there's a lot of rubbish out there but there are also some real gems.

Got any gems you think the rest of us ought to know about?

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