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A report on Wired says that QTrax has done deals with all the major music labels to deliver advertising-supported music. The company says there's no iPod compatibility "yet", but it's coming. The company claims a 25-million song catalog (that would be one of the biggest) and will piggyback on tracks available on torrents and other P2P services. It will utilize Songbird's engine and run in FireFox. The ads will run in the application and labels will get the "lion's share" of the revenue, based on how many times a track is downloaded. The company identifies the rights holder – say, on the 'grey list', music that's not available from majors and indie labels – and hands over revenues to them, on a per-download basis. There's also a – diminishing – blacklist of artists who do not permit their works to be downloaded. More importantly, how do they get the music on an iPod? QTrax hasn't said yet. It would either have to be unprotected AAC/MP3 or they could 'do a Real' and try to circumvent iPod/iTunes' Fairplay DRM. But we wouldn't hold our breath. The question is why people who regularly download from torrents or P2P services like LimeWire would bother using yet another P2P client (with ads and phoning home, almost definitely). Maybe for legal users, there's an incentive because it's 'free'.
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