International Law

A big announcement Midem conference in Cannes, France:

After years of fighting peer-to-peer file-sharing companies, the major record labels have decided that if they can't beat them, they might as well join them -- in one case, anyway.  At the Midem conference in Cannes, France, Qtrax announced deals with all the major music labels and publishers to offer the first free and legal ad-supported P2P service to include major label music.

"You can't change the attitudes and habits of what is now probably amounting to two generations who believe that music ought to be free on the internet," said Qtrax CEO Allan Klepfisz.  "Those people are not going to be discouraged by Supreme Court decisions, they're not going to be discouraged by technological interference. Ultimately, what will discourage them is a demonstratively better service."

Read more here (from Wired).

Ars Technica evaluates the business model of Qtrax:

Qtrax, a newly-launched "legal" P2P music sharing service, isn't your father's P2P. The music label-approved service pushes advertisements at users in exchange for free P2P downloads, imagining itself to be a great way to wean file-sharers off the sweet nectar of illicit P2P. The service officially launches tonight at midnight.

Qtrax has more than 25 million tracks (compared to Amazon's 3+ million), and has reportedly signed all the major music labels: Sony BMG, Universal, EMI, and Warner. The majority of the company's tracks are tunes which have not been cleared by rights holders for download, but they're offering them anyway. Qtrax will work with rights holders and the labels to see that the proper parties are compensated if/when such songs are played. (Check Further Reading for more on this.)

The service has a few things going for it. As advertised, you can download music for free. The selection is huge, because it's powered by the Gnutella P2P network. You can think of Qtrax as a Gnutella-based P2P client that adds another layer of oversight (and DRM) to the P2P experience. This is easily Qtrax's most compelling but also its most controversial feature, in my opinion.

To be successful, Qtrax needs to be better than traditional P2P. By hopping on Gnutella, it has a broad offering behind it, but it's Qtrax's Zune-style moves which may cause the most pushback.

Read more here.

Here is Michael Arrington's take:

It isn?t pretty - the downloaded songs are not compatible with iPods and have to be played via a proprietary player built on the Songbird platform. Ads are displayed during playback, even on music devices. For now the service is Windows only, so Mac users are left out. And right now the service is down completely from all the attention it?s getting.

For most people, BitTorrent and the music search engines are all they need for their illegal-but-highly-convenient music needs. Any additional hurdles means not a ton of usage. And since services like Imeem and Last.fm provide free on demand streaming music with ads, there is already real competition out there for Qtrax.

But the trend is clear - labels have given up on DRM completely and are willing to experiment with ad supported free downloads. Once they give up on the ad supported part of the model and just realize that recorded music is nothing more than marketing collateral for other revenue streams like live performances, we?ll have gotten somewhere. But my guess is that one of the labels has to go out of business first for that to happen. 

Read more here (from TechCrunch).