Failing to fail

28 January 2008

No time for full length rambling today. Short and sweet.

You’ve heard of Qtrax by now, I guess? The concept is fairly simple: you download a player, based on Songbird, which gives you access to millions of legal tracks using a P2P system, with revenue coming from adverts in the player.

It’s going to fail, and I find it slightly depressing.

To ensure that people see adverts when they download the tracks all the tracks are DRM’d (I’m hearing it’s WMA) so they will only play in the Qtrax player. Not on any portable device. I had thought that we’d got past this, folks – if you are selling music (even if the payment is in eyeballs) you have to be iPod compatible. It’s a waste of everyone’s time just reading the press release.

Of course, there’s another sting in tail (or should that be tale?) in that it turns out that Qtrax announced before they’d signed on with the labels that they were claiming to have done deals with.

These Qtrax guys really seem to be smart people, doing good business.