This is being covered to death elsewhere, so I won’t spend too much time on it. But if a startup is going to spend nearly $1 million announcing a new digital music service claiming more than 25 million free legal song downloads, it might want to coordinate its announcement with the music labels it is supposedly partnering with.
In what may be the dumbest business move of the year so far, Qtrax announced its free music download service this weekend before bothering to sign contracts with three of the four major labels. Now the music companies are saying, “Wait a second, there is no deal yet. We’re just talking to Qtrax.” Without the labels on board, there is no service.
We jumped on this story just like many other blogs and media outlets. Michael got a little excited about the prospect of ad-supported music downloads, and threw up a post while changing planes on his way back to the U.S. from Davos. The Times of London and many others bought the story as well. Maybe it was because the company’s CEO, with a straight face, told an audience at a music conference in Cannes and members of the press that all the major labels had signed on. That was clearly a misrepresentation, possibly a fraudulent one. Hyping your product is one thing. Telling an outright lie is another.
Qtrax is a subsidiary of Brilliant Technologies Corporation, which trades as penny stock, has not filed a 10Q with the SEC since last May), and has raised $30 million to launch this service. Its next move had better be more brilliant than its last one.
Stupid!
What is shocking is if the labels will actually do a deal now with a company that has so blatantly misrepresented itself in the public market. I can not imagine how a major label will go into business with something seemingly so fraudulent.
Independent of the labels, what on earth do their investors have to say?
I’m not sure if all the negative press will actually help these guys - it may - or it coudl very well be one of the fastest crash and burns in Internet history.
Seriously. You can’t even download the thing. This market is already becoming too crowded. Qtrax blew it.
Qtrax clearly jumped the gun. My thinking is also that it could have exposed itself to some liability here. It is misrepresenting the actions of the music labels with which it has not signed contracts. Qtrax should have acted more prudently. That was not a business-savvy move.
After reading about the company in some of mondays papers here in the UK , I thought their PR was brilliant. Shame they have blown it.
you can download the client because they did a mail out to their various contacts this morning .Have fun with this one
http://qtrax-cdod-r1.vitalstre.....s-i686.exe
Another nice Feature of Qtrax/Songbird (If your not the RIAA) is that you can download MP3s from Music blogs and webpages really easily becuse it parse the page for Mp3s and gives you a real easy to use Download manager in the client .Try it out EMI ,Sony ,Warner,Universal this is what your fans really want
.
http://www.kleptones.com/pages/downloads.html
But what is even funnier is the face saving bullshit press release they relased this afternoon after the days trading finished and their stock plummeted.
http://money.cnn.com/news/news.....2008-1.htm
I will believe it only when I see it now. Until then I will still have to rely on seeqpod.com
Qtrax blew it but the media blew it harder. That Press Release got regurgitated like a news item, down to the part about ‘The site is down right due to all the attention its getting’. Kudos for following up and being painfully honest about it TC. I wonder what QT’s investors are thinking right now?
You actually can download the software elsewhere (Google “Qtrax blog”);
you just can’t download any music. (Yet?)
The whole reprinting of press releases with a couple comments and calling it news is getting old. Not just here, every major blog did it, and it’s too bad. I would think there’s plenty of news that doesn’t need a press release to trigger it. LAME, but again I can’t imagine being broke-ass enough to not be able to spend like $5-$10 for music I like, so whatever.
This tells you a lot about the company in general. Qtrax is going to be another deadpool item if they don’t straighten it up. The Beta Download (available at midnight, est!) button is still up on their site, btw.
2nd’ing Morgan. Can’t anybody at TC even go out of their way to look up the names of the principals of the company? I mean, if Dave Sifry can get his name in a headline for launching an also-ran NIH website, surely that level of detail can be brought to bear on such a piddling business model as legally downloadable music.
Webside, et al: Think of it another way: what do the labels have to gain by rejecting qtrax’ business model?
Either this is a Viral marketing coup (meaning this was on purpose for a greater benefit down the line) or somebody in his company saying something that isn’t true… I can’t believe a person at the top making this kind of mistake.
Jon
http://woodmarvels.com - Create Unique Memories
this was an obvious hoax… you sir are a sucker.
EH,
Here is who is involved in the Co:
Allan Klepfisz - CEO
Rick Riccobono - VP of Digital Rights Management
Rebel Digital does all the ad sales
Company phone #(212) 532-2736
Download is now available on the site.
There are less than 10M tracks available as of this posting
If this is legit, the labels can now extract some very advantageous terms in any agreement with these guys. If this was actually intended in order to gain some sort of compelling leverage with the labels, what an incredibly bad decision.
Ok…so I downloaded it…searched for songs…when you go to click to download the song it says “Download coming soon” This could be one of the greatest frauds in Internet History!
It’s hard to know what the effect will be. As for ultimately-unavailable listings, wasn’t there another celestial jukebox attempt that had similar problems? Like, sure you can see a zillion songs, but you can only buy from the pool of ~4000 songs that the majors will license for karaoke.
Info: Thanks for the…info, but “greatest fraud” I think “not even close.”
EH is probably correct but a Co that spends a million bucks to launch and gets as much press coverage as these guys did has to make it at least to the hall of fame, oops, shame.
Qtrax, here’s a good business model for ya “Do no Harm !”
in the end, you have to face your conscience, QTRAX !
thats the hardest..
poor them !
Ujw
So it downloaded a song for me. Now will I have the RIAA knocking on my screen and can I use the ‘QTRAX defence’; “They told me it was legal”! I already erased it but the forensic team is probably on the way to my office. I guess I’ll just jump…..
Maybe a lot of thought was needed in the first place, cannot understand why one would spend so much when all the ends have not been tied up.
It’s nice of them to let us download the client, but it would be much nicer of them to let us actually download songs. Are these songs going to be portable at all? My regrets to the great team over at Songbird who got their player dragged into this mess.
I was dubious of the Qtrax announcement a few days ago. Here is my reasoning: iTunes Music Store was released in 97/98? Maybe even ‘96. It took up until late 2007 for DRM-free tracks to become a reality on iTunes/Amazon. It took the music industry roughly 10 years to go from putting their big toes in the digital distribution waters, to allowing users to purchase and listen to their purchases any way they wanted. Suddenly overnight - in music industry time - we’re seeing free music downloads!?! And all that’s required is that the user view ads? Doesn’t sound likely.
Not bein an expert on the figures, but it seems to this layman that the music industry is just now seeing that money ($$$$) can be made from digital music purchases. They’re going to move away from a growing market, to sign-up for an untested business model? Maybe they have, but I am doubtful.
Music for publicity! it sounds good. At least already the version for Windows is ready, that is what the majority we used. And with the support of great companies - what it increases the catalogue of songs.
But remember - it´s for personal use, not for sale pirates CD.
OMG, I finally tried, and its such a bad joke. Their page has been up for like 2 years or more, but they never had ANYTHING.
The QTrax application is nothing but Songbird branded to be QTrax, they didn’t even hide the XULRunner menues, they just put this together a few months ago, its badly finished, it’s just a webapp on a custom browser.
I can so see this QTrax company being run by a bunch of old farts that couldn’t cut the deals with the Record Labels, and decided to do the unthinkable to see if the record labels would play along once a supposed deal was made public using millions of dollars in publicity.
NOT.
After beating my head against the wall trying to use this application I finally figured out how to listen to some music - I opened a new tab and typed in http://www.imeem.com - problem solved.
Well it looks like they pulled all access to the songs…so what exactly was the whole press announcement and blowing all that money for if you dont actually have a product offering?
I have downloaded the application, but it won’t let me download any song. Perhaps there is nothing to download, as the labels haven’t signed on…
So much hype and speculation for nothing… :S
Um yeah, just a page loading that has nothing to do with the service. And funny thing is that it tells you what the admin user account is. Now you only have to crack the pw, half the job is done for you. So so stupid!!
Forget Qtrax! http://www.gratista.com oh gratista you so good me me baby! No gimmicks, no delay, ohhh yeah
Why was the name Jonathan taken by someone that’s only going to advertise here?
Anyways, its funny how fast word spreads about the failure that is Qtrax. Its probably related to how much excitement Qtrax created. It just set everyone’s hopes up so that when the news gets out that Qtrax messed up, it would come crashing down. Good job Qtrax.