Qtrax: 25 Million Free and Legal Music Downloads, Zero Major Label Love

If you can’t beat them, (reluctantly) join them – or don’t.

New P2P website Qtrax was scheduled to launch this morning with support from the four major labels – Universal Music Group, Sony-BMG Music, Warner Music Group, and EMI Group – but alas, they all dropped out last minute. One can guess the reason had something to do with not being super profitable, or maybe they’re all just being the man that wants to keep the people down.

While similar P2P sites have been around forever (with varying results), Qtrax is unique to an extent. The network exclusively relies on advertising that comes with their software for profit. (According to Qtrax the ads are not AdWare or SpyWare – how nice of them!) If you can live with a few annoying pop-ups and banners here and there, you’ll be treated to over 25 million downloadable songs for free – and 100% legal to boot. No shady subscriptions, no major problems.

Well, that was until the majors dropped out.

Due to their website loading at a snail’s pace today, it’s hard to determine what Qtrax has in store for hopeful users, though it’s apparent that all big studio releases will be omitted from their library. Twenty-five million songs available at launch? Try 250,000 if you’re really, really lucky.

Although Qtrax tracks aren’t supposed to be compatible with FairPlay, Apple’s DRM format, Allen Klepfisz, Qtrax’s president and chief executive, has stated the service does indeed work with iPods. Here’s hoping that PC-savvy hacks devise a foolproof (read: legal) way to make it work for us common people (Mac users have to wait until March for an Apple-compatible Qtrax).

Qtrax could collapse with the Big Four abandoning, leaving them with a half-assed library and miles of legal red tape – and that’s too bad. The music industry fails to see the profitability of digital downloads, which is asinine considering the skyrocketing promotional costs they waste on today’s big-name artists. Could cutting back a cool mil on promoting Coldplay be such a bad idea? The bigwigs seem to think so, thus only rely on big pushes on their most bankable albums to break even.

Attention major label honchos: playing it safe doesn’t matter when nobody’s playing the game.