Sorry to disappoint, but
Qtrax is falling just a bit short of its promised 25 million tracks at launch. Qtrax busted out its software in "beta" this evening, but isn't offering a single song -- or even a working music browser. The application is a barely skinned version of the open source Mozilla-based Songbird music player, which has certainly come a long ways since its infancy, and which means Qtrax has done just about nothing for you yet -- other than lie about label deals. When you launch the application it helpfully points you to a placeholder page from a Oracle application server, and that's all you'll be getting until Qtrax manages to get label deals sorted, which isn't looking likely at this point.
Update: 4 hours later and we can see music. About 10 million tracks by their count. However, clicking download results in an error message, "Downloads coming soon!!" How soon, exactly? Would that be after the contracts are signed?
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Read - Qtrax
Read - Music labels say no deal
posted January 28th 2008 11:30PM
If your going to be on Sky News and advertising your free music upcoming service to anyone who'll listen you need to be ready at launch otherwise you deserve all the smart cracks aimed your way.
It sounds like flytunes.fm
This will probably sound like a conspiracy, but all the Songbird software does is scan your system at this point. It sounds like this software is nothing more than a Trojan horse to catalog exactly how mush illegal music people actually have on their systems. Also, a police informant or snitch is also known as a songbird.
I'm actually at Midem at the moment (where they launched), and all of this is amusing me GREATLY. To put it one way, the Qtrax execs are making themselves bloody scarce right now! It's a good job they have offices upstairs, away from the madding crowd - if they had a stand downstairs or on the Riviera level, they'd be being swamped with press and other attendees constantly. This does make me wonder whether it was just a bit of publicity, even if it ostensibly looks like they've made a big miscalculation...
... But if this wasn't deliberate, all this happening in the space of just two days - as cockups go, this was a pretty good one!