Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Without the four major labels, the number of songs on the network, at over a supposed 9 million, is still far less than the promised 25 million tracks heavily advertised and promoted on the Qtrax website.
Without the majors, the best Qtrax could hope for will be to become a niche player offering independent companies or small labels to consumers free of charge, paid for by advertising served up as people use Qtrax to search for, download and play music.
In its current form, Qtrax is just a tease and little more than a customised version of the open source Songbird music management software.
Qtrax’ only real functions for now are to allow you to manage and play the music already on your own system, and apparently import/rip music from CDs, although I wasn’t able to test that, and at this stage, wouldn’t use Qtrax to do this anyway.
If you're curious, download it by all means. But if you're in no rush, especially when the service doesn't work properly yet anyway, then try it again after a few days. There really is nothing to see there yet, anyway, and as such, is quite disappointing.
Qtrax say they’re working on getting the agreements with the major labels completed, but despite their CEO stating that they’re ‘not idiots’ for throwing a 500,000 Pound launch party saying that they did have the support of the major labels, only to have them all come out and state the opposite was true and no deals had been signed yet, is, well... weird.
I guess they were committed and it would cost the same – or a good portion of it - to pull the plug – so why not have a party! Laving and amazing launch parties are one of the things most dotcom companies from the 90s are remembered for these days.
The Qtrax roller coaster rolls on. If they do manage to truly pull off free legal music downloads, even if wrapped by Windows DRM (and supposedly coming for iTunes, and almost certainly in violation of Apple’s Fairplay terms and conditions), it will be pretty revolutionary, and could have a massive impact on bricks and mortar music stores, even more than illegal piracy has had already.
But... if the music suddenly stops, even if turned on for a while, Qtrax had better hope it still has a chair to sit on, or their investors will be asking the current management to start singing a new tune!
David Bass
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