Revamped online music service Qtrax turned on its lights at midnight last night, and already they’ve hit a snag: Warner Music Group, Universal, and EMI say it never agreed to be on board.
Qtrax is supposed to combine the breadht of music available via peer-to-peer services like Gnutella and BitTorrent with an ad-supported mechanism which actually compensates artists and labels for users downloading their music. Unlike traditional online music services like iTunes, Qtrax claims to provide access to more than 25 million tracks—and it can make that claim only because it operates essentially has a front end to the Gnutella file sharing network. The vast majority of those tracks have not been licensed for online sale, but Qtrax says it will keep track of everything and work out the details with copyright holders so that everyone gets appropriately compensated for downloads.
