Cannes, France — The entire two-day MidemNet conference here had one corporate sponsor; Qtrax, a would-be P2P service that claims to offer licensed music (ad-supported) for free. There are Qtrax banners all over the Palais des Festivals. Qtrax landed itself lots of media coverage, because they were supposed to debut yesterday (Monday). But on Sunday afternoon their CEO was sitting on a MidemNet panel with Ted Cohen and not all seemed right. Ted joked that the CEO was only there because he was the show's corporate sponsor, but he didn't laugh. Ted then said he knew Qtrax had said it had licensing deals with all of the major labels, something Qtrax itself had been saying. The CEO just said that we'd all learn more tomorrow. (He also declined to say what sort of copy protections the songs would have and how it was that they claimed compatibility with iPods in an non-MP3 format without a licensing deal with Apple for Fairplay.)

Well, we did learn more on Monday, namely that Qtrax remains a bit of a shadow player. The company has been teasing Midem attendees for four years now, but it appears they approached their launch without licensing from at least three of the four major labels. They've been suggesting that they had such licensing for some time, as news stories and this 8-K suggest, but then again that 8-K also predicted a Q1 2007 launch. 

Please understand I don't mean Qtrax ill. I want more services available to consumers to compete with free. But licensing isn't some trivial little thing you save until after you've set a launch date and have had young, thin brunettes handing out free corporate-branded flash drives to every Midem attendee. Taking care of the artists comes first. Remember, it's not cool new technology that causes one's hairs to stand on end, it's music. 

The former reporter in me was going absolutely nuts as I watched Qtrax's CEO dance on that stage; I desparately wanted to know what was really going on. Ted Cohen knows more about the music industry than I could ever hope for, but he apparently lacks my investigative instincts because he didn't press. (Or maybe he didn't press because Qtrax was the conference's financial backer.) Regardless, I hope everything works out, but if I was a label rep and I was watching that performance on Sunday, in a hall filled with Qtrax banners announcing the death of the CD and the rebirth of revenue through Qtrax, I'd really be wondering just how much I was willing to trust this man, and this company.

One would like to think that the dishonest behavior we saw with P2P companies in the past was not related to the technology. Of course, Qtrax's parent, Brilliant Technologies, brought us the Altnet ad network that came paired with Kazaa and caused much controversy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 2:12 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under creators, market forces, p2p. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.