Qtrax: The Great Big Rip Off

Qtrax was due to begin its life at midnight (EST) on the 28th of January 2008. It had been billed as a website which would offer free downloads for its users. The intention of the site was that it would be run entirely by advert revenue as adverts were set to be placed around the interface and this is how money would be generated for the artists and for the record labels. The people of Qtrax stated that all four of the major record labels of the world were on board and they would therefore be able to provide in excess of 25 million songs for all to download completely free of charge.

The claims that Qtrax had made had obviously caused quite a stir, and therefore there were a lot of articles that came to the fore praising this great new service that would be offered. The problem was that midnight came and went, and still there was no music available for download. Over the first couple of days of the sites release their service was available in a number of different forms. At times it was fully active and music was searchable, however when you tried to download anything you were told that this service was not yet available. At other times the page would just load as blank, and the rest of the time all that was displayed was an internal Oracle database administration page. Basically, Qtrax did not meet the claims that it had made and this therefore understandably caused a great uproar amongst Internet users and people of the media alike.

One of the main reasons that the website caused such a great stir was that it already had adverts present on the system and yet Qtrax was essentially not even providing any service yet. Qtrax were therefore creating advert revenue before they had even met their claims and provided people with the free music downloads that they had been expecting. Not a very good business plan, one that you can entirely understand the upset of in fact.

The reason that Qtrax did not meet its claims and offered no music from the day it said it would was because none of the four major record labels actually did genuinely back Qtrax and no such deals had been arranged with any of the labels for the website to allow people to download the music. Why on earth Qtrax decided to make such bold claims is beyond me, and when questioned about their claims they simply backtracked and said that they were actually in talks with the labels, realising that they could not stick with their original story which had been found to be a lie.

One by one, the big four of the music industry confirmed that they would not be allowing for Qtrax to supply their music at this stage and that no deals had been arranged. Without the blessing of the major labels then the service could of course not go ahead and all their big ideas were resultantly shot down. This has led to a rethink from Qtrax in their way of marketing the website and they simply state that the ability to download music will be coming soon. 'Coming soon' is simply not good enough from a service that was claiming to offer 24 million tracks free for download as of near on a month ago. The fact they are stalling so much shows how unlikely they are to back up their claims and pull through with a working website from which music can be legally downloaded.

It still remains untold as to whether or not the Qtrax service will ever emerge. My personal opinion of it is that it will never happen and that through lying, Qtrax have ruined any chance they may have had of securing a deal with any of the four major labels. I can't see that any of the big four would ever possibly trust Qtrax now, I certainly wouldn't if I were in charge of such a record label. In business it is important to keep a respectable image, and to do this you must provide what you say you will, and faults must at all times be kept to a minimum. You can't help but distrust Qtrax, a service that has shown just how much of a let down they can be and one that made bold claims that were proven to be straight up lies.