Qtrax

» see qtrax.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Qtrax announced itself in january 2008 at midem, the music industry's big trade fair in cannes, with the kind of claim that stops a room: millions of free, licensed music downloads, blessed by all four major labels. It was paid for by advertising, so the listener paid nothing. For a few hours it was the most talked-about thing in the business.

The claim came apart almost as fast as it landed. Warner music put out a statement, hours before the planned launch, saying it had authorized nothing, and the other majors followed. The download client, when it did appear, was windows-only and locked every track behind drm. Its catalog turned out to include bootlegs and images the company had no right to use. This was already the second attempt; an earlier qtrax in 2002 had been pulled within months to avoid a lawsuit. Ltdnetwork, under ceo allan klepfisz, blamed a competitor for the damage and kept going.

By 2008 i had a ttnet broadband line in ankara and enough years online to recognize the shape of this. The music that reached me came from napster first, years earlier, and then from places nobody bothered to call legal. Qtrax was selling the opposite, free files with the labels' signature on them, and the signature was the whole product. I never installed it. It limped on for another decade, a court order in tel aviv and unpaid staff behind it, before it finally went dark late in 2019.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the pitch ~

Free and legal was the phrase every downloader in the mid-2000s wanted to hear. Napster had been sued into a paid service, kazaa and grokster were being chased through the courts, and everyone knew the labels held the leverage. Qtrax's whole idea was to make peace with them: run ads, split the money, hand people the free downloads they were already taking but with permission. On paper it answered the exact problem of the era. The one missing piece was the permission, which it never actually had.

~ what really happened ~

The strange thing about qtrax is how long it survived being caught. A normal company embarrassed that publicly in 2008 would have folded by summer. Instead it spent years re-announcing itself and cutting deals it then lost, and by 2015 a court in tel aviv was expected to close it while it owed its own employees back pay. It hung on anyway, still online in some form as late as september 2019, then quietly stopped by november. The pitch had outlived the product by a decade.

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