Last night, stories were circulating that QTrax would offer free ad-supported peer-to-peer downloads of music from all the major labels. The songs would need to be played on the Songbird platform and would contain ads, even on music devices. But QTrax claimed it would offer a whopping 25 million songs for download, compared to 3 million for Amazon and 6 million for iTunes.

QTrax also claims compatiblity with iPod was around the corner.

However, there’s been a bit of controversy since the announcement. First of all, the service is not yet available despite claims it would be. Second, exactly zero of the four major music labels claim they have a deal with QTrax. Third, there is no deal official deal with iPod in the works. Oops.

The first thing that seemed a little strange about this whole thing was that it would be on a P2P platform, which isn’t exactly the greatest way to go as far as music downloading goes and would theoretically require the consent of every major and indie label before it could launch without being swamped with lawsuits.

In a week that has been flooded with music news from the likes of Last.fm and Amazon MP3, this latest announcement was met with breathless reports all over the mainstream press and blogosphere. However, after the latest revelations, QTrax looks like “a bit of a joke right now,” according to Michael Arrington at TechCrunch.

More on this soon, I’m sure.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 1:32 pmand is filed under Articles, Business. 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.