DRM is dying, but slowly - p2p puts the boot in now

Monday, January 28. 2008

DRM is dying, but slowly - p2p puts the boot in now

From TechCrunch:

Qtrax, which has signed all four major labels (EMI, SonyBMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group), launched yesterday with 25 million songs (compared to around 3 m for Amazon and 6 m for iTunes)

Or maybe not....2 of the suppliers say there is no deal...ooops. Anyway, on with the show

It isn’t pretty - the downloaded songs are not compatible with iPods and have to be played via a proprietary player built on the Songbird platform. Ads are displayed during playback, even on music devices. For now the service is Windows only, so Mac users are left out. And right now the service is down completely from all the attention it’s getting.

For most people, BitTorrent and the music search engines are all they need for their illegal-but-highly-convenient music needs. Any additional hurdles means not a ton of usage. And since services like Imeem and Last.fm provide free on demand streaming music with ads, there is already real competition out there for Qtrax.

Not to mention Amazon weighing in.........anyway, to continue

But the trend is clear - labels have given up on DRM completely and are willing to experiment with ad supported free downloads. Once they give up on the ad supported part of the model and just realize that recorded music is nothing more than marketing collateral for other revenue streams

Italics are mine.

I can't help but feel uncomfortable with music being a giveaway for other services. Not that I think TC is wrong, mind - just that I'm not certain what sort of quality of music will be generated this way. The temptation to use Ad Jingle 7 singles will be overwhelming mayhap?

And who uses a service with proprietary end to end delivery and Ads?

Qtrax is a son of Spiral Frog, which failed to do a similar thing....but as The Register notes, the music industry is a sucker for the "you can make money from music online" snake oil crowd:

It's a marriage of two desperate industries – the music business, and the ad-supported web startup. To steal a phrase from Sun's Scott McNealy, it's like watching two garbage trucks colliding.

Posted by Alan Patrick at 00:42 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

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So the funniest thing I've heard about QTrax is that they announced going live on monday, but 3 of the 4 labels have since said they do not have any deals with q-trax.
It sounds like this thing will be stillborn technologicly and legally from day one.

I'll stick with imeem.com - as music sites go you can't argue with 'Youtube for mp3s'.

#1 Panic 911 on 2008-01-28 05:12 (Reply)

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