Qtrax is relaunching as a legal service and has announced a deal with EMI Music to make its music catalogue available to its users.
LOS ANGELES: Like Napster and BitTorrent before it, LTDnetwork’s Qtrax is a brand from the early days of peer-to-peer music piracy that is relaunching as a completely legal service.
The reborn version formalised the evolution by announcing a deal with EMI Music to make the music company's catalogue available to its users.
Qtrax still allows consumers to get free music, but there will be no free lunch. The service is ad-supported, and the free songs are in a proprietary ‘.mpq’ format that can only be played a limited number of times and only on the computer to which they were downloaded. Additionally, each time a track is played, the Qtrax player offers click-to-buy purchasing.
It also suggests that the user upgrade to a premium subscription service for a flat monthly fee, in which case they get unlimited downloads in Windows Media format that can be moved or transferred to almost any digital music player except Apple’s iPod.
The songs become unplayable should the subscription lapse. “Qtrax is going to offer the consumer a pretty cool way to sample and discover music in a way that P2P users are used to,” said Ken Parks, EMI’s senior vice president for strategy and business development. “The difference is, you’ll be presented with stuff that is cleared in a way that respects copyright yet preserving that ‘free’ experience.”
Financial terms of the EMI deal were not disclosed, but EMI does get a share of advertising revenue generated by Qtrax. Some of the advertising will be served in way relevant to the results of song searches and will include click-through options to buy products on Shopping.com. An additional opportunity allows labels to promote artists through spotlight placement on the Web site.
Parks said that EMI also will get valuable data because it will know every time a song is played and whether that resulted in the consumer making a purchase. That same tracking capability ensures that royalty payments are very accurate, he added.
There is no firm date for Qtrax to launch, though EMI has begun delivering and registering its content with Qtrax’s filtering system, powered by Audible Magic.
Qtrax will incorporate community-building and music discovery tools along with incentive programs that provide discounts or additional music plays.
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