From today, feel free to download another 25 million songs - legally

Times Online ^ | January 28, 2008 | Adam Sherwin

[KevinB]

After a decade fighting to stop illegal file-sharing, the music industry will give fans today what they have always wanted: an unlimited supply of free and legal songs.

With CD sales in free fall and legal downloads yet to fill the gap, the music industry has reluctantly embraced the file-sharing technology that threatened to destroy it. Qtrax, a digital service announced today, promises a catalogue of more than 25 million songs that users can download to keep, free and with no limit on the number of tracks.

The service has been endorsed by the very same record companies - including EMI, Universal Music and Warner Music – that have chased file-sharers through the courts in a doomed attempt to prevent piracy. The gamble is that fans will put up with a limited amount of advertising around the Qtrax website’s jukebox in return for authorised use of almost every song available.

[KevinB]

Rock and Roll PING!

[driftdiver]

Is this legit? Seems so from the number of other articles out there.

[Nickname]

The tactics they’ve been using haven’t been working—they’ll need to do something.

This site is reporting that three of the four have not agreed:

Labels back away from Qtrax

# Warner, Universal, EMI agreements in doubt
# Qtrax may not offer 30 million tracks at launch

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23121891-1702,00.html

[harpu]

'tis indeed!

[KevinB]

Yikes, already posted. My bad. Sorry.

[A.A. Cunningham]

Actual title:

From today, feel free to download another 25 million songs - legally

[Hoosiersailor]

ping for later

[incindiary]

[Chorus singing] Haaaallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujaaaah [/Chorus]

;-)

[Allen In Texas Hill Country]

The article I read said the music contained DCMA (?) rights that prevents it from being copied to a CD. How would this be done without the CD burners help.

[Larry Lucido]

The catch is, you have to download ALL the music in the world. That’s a pretty big file.

[varyouga]

I guess they realized that most music coming out today isn’t worth buying a whole album or paying a dollar per song.

Even if you download the song legally, the copy protection is such a pain that you’d wish you just stole it. My mother has gigs of downloaded music that we can’t figure out how to open anymore.

[ShadowAce]

[Izzy Dunne]

Let's see: they won't play on an iPod, the most popular player.

They promise a solution to that "later", but Apple won't be involved in that solution.

Apple is not going to stand by and support some technical hack that gets around FairPlay.

They use P2P, when means that everybody and their brother can substitute fake files, gorched files, and spyware-infested crap files to all the users.

Yeah, that's gonna work.

[rightgrafix]

Old news... I’ve been downloading songs from the internet for free for years! /S

[Salo]

Dear Thief,

That will $12,000 for the use of our intellectual property.

Love,

The RIAA

[Chorus singing] Haaaallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujaaaah [/Chorus]

[lormand]

I used iTunes recently for the first time and found that the music was using DRM (Digital Rights Managment). The way to get around it is to burn the iTune downloads to a CD, then to rip them from the CD to WMA, MP3 or other file types if desired.

[incindiary]

So the article is wrong when it says that it would be legal?

[Salo]

It was a joke: if the RIAA had it’s way, they’d charge you for the song stuck in your head. :-) There seems to be some controversy involving this service now.

[incindiary]

Ha, true. Well let's hope they don't try something like that. ;-) I kinda miss the early days when napster was around.