QTrax Tonight

At midnight tonight, QTrax will be unveiling what can potentially be a radically new business model for downloading music online. To be fair though, the business model is in no way innovative. Offsetting costs of membership-free sites with banner ads is about the oldest trick in the book. The difference in this case is the fact that the major labels are actually on board with this idea, as Wired recently reported.

This actually looks pretty exciting. You can still hear the loud roar of those people against DRM claiming that this is not progress, but I think we should see how DRM would actually be able to limit the portability of music that has already been made freely available to anyone over that network. Considering that they plan on making iPod compatible in the near future, the music provided by this service should not only be able to move from machine to machine (by sharing it, at worst case), but from music player to music player. Without having seen the application in action, I can’t imagine how DRM in this context could do much harm.

Update 1 (01/28/08 1:00 AM): Seems like QTrax might be in some hot water with some final attempts to start the service, as reported by Silicon Valley Insider. At 9:57pm, QTrax was still in discussion with WMG trying to finalize the deal. This might explain why there is still no beta available to download. Will they be able to pull this off?

Update 2 (01/28/08 2:00 AM): The guys over at GameDrift seem just as anxious as me to get my hands on this stuff and play. They claim that the launch has been moved to midnight PST (instead of EST) and are going to be waiting to report on this live, so check it out.

Update 3 (01/28/08 12:00 PM):

“The future of Qtrax, a new file-sharing website which promised legal downloads of over 25m music tracks, is in doubt today after three of the four major record labels denied giving the site permission to use their music.” – source: Guardian Unlimited Music

Update 4 (01/28/08 6:13pm): The guys over at GameDrift did a little digging and found a link to the 0.2 beta version of QTrax. Keep in mind, downloading from the service is still disabled, but if you want to check it out, you can either install or check with GameDrift for their overview.

Update 5 (01/28/28 10:20pm): QTrax officially released the software from this download link (link from the download page). The site is currently acting up, but hopefully downloads will begin when it starts functioning again.