QTrax makes deal for legal music sharing

From Wired: devel­op­ers are launch­ing a beta ver­sion of QTrax, after reach­ing deals with the major music labels to allow free music downloads.

QTrax is an ad-supported P2P appli­ca­tion that works within the Fire­fox web browser on Win­dows com­put­ers. Inter­net Explorer and Safari are not sup­ported. Macs will be sup­ported on 18 March, accord­ing to this arti­cle from New York’s Sil­i­con Allwy Insider.

That arti­cle also reveals that Uni­ver­sal was the final of the 4 major labels to sign with QTrax.

The music files use Win­dows Media DRM, so they prob­a­bly won’t work on iPods. A QTrax spokes­men claims iPod com­pat­i­bil­ity is high on the service’s list, and this Asso­ci­ated Press arti­cle says that QTrax has devel­oped a workaround for iTunes com­pat­i­bil­ity. Apple has released patches to break pre­vi­ous iTunes workarounds by other companies.

QTrax has signed over most of the music rev­enues to the labels, so the ser­vice will earn the bulk of its mar­gin by sell­ing highly tar­geted web adver­tis­ing. Of course, it is triv­ial to block ads in Fire­fox web pages by using an exten­sion like AdBlock Plus. Whether AdBlock will work with the QTrax Song­bird engine is another ques­tion. OpenDNS should block the ads, as I men­tioned on 3 Sep­tem­ber 2007.

When I checked QTrax.com a few min­utes ago, I saw a sin­gle image that claimed the ser­vice was over­whelmed by demand — check in tomorrow.

Tagged as: advertising, Apple, business_model, DNS, Firefox, free, hack, Internet, iPod, marketing, media, Microsoft, mobile, MP3, music, network, opendns, P2P