Until Saturday I was really excited about Qtrax. It all made sense, 4 music labels, 25 million songs, free music. And then it all went downhill. Reports came in that the music downloaded was going to be DRM-laden and could not be used on any other software music player or portable music players. Come Monday, the launch was delayed for quite a bit and various reports came in that none of the music labels had actually signed a deal with QTrax. Things weren’t looking so good.

But I’ve finally managed to grab my hands on a copy and to tell you the truth it’s far from impressive.

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Qtrax is a service aiming to provide free music to it’s users on ad supported model. It is is said to have the support of the Big 4 Music labels as well as many Indie bands and will thus include an impressive 25ish million tracks on launch, which is expected to be Monday. Client will be Windows only with the Mac beta client coming March 18th, or so they say.

What’s impressive is that the service will also feature content from concerts and shows as early as the next day. The application itself features a music portal, music player and a web browser (Firefox). The video shows a decent interface but doesn’t mention if the songs downloaded will be playable in other media players or transferred to PMPs. Although with all companies having dropped DRM, one would be surprised if there were any sort of restrictions with the service. In any case, Monday couldn’t come sooner, atleast for the sake of giving it a trial run.

It may not be apparent but the music industry has changed tremendously over the past year. With DRM almost extinct, the labels have shown that they are indeed willing to accept the changes in the mindset of this generation, and the launch of Qtrax is a testimonial to that.

Link : http://www.qtrax.com