Qtrax, the "world's first free, legal P2P service," has signed a deal with music publisher Warner/Chappell, which had been the last of the big four music publishers to hold out on signing a deal. EMI Publishing and Sony/ATV signed with Qtrax in early March and Universal signed earlier this month, meaning that as of today Qtrax has deals with every major music publisher in the world. A spokeswoman for Warner/Chappell confirmed that the deal was signed.
Although this is a significant milestone for Qtrax, the company still needs more label deals in order to put these publisher deals into effect. So far, only Universal Music Group, TVT Records and Beggars have signed on, so Qtrax still has a fair amount of work cut out for it label-wise. TVT's music is already downloadable, while Universal's is still being added. A spokeswoman for Qtrax said the Beggars catalog, consisting of over a thousand indie labels, will start showing up in about a week.
But the deal brings the company one step closer to its stated goalof offering legal, ad-supported, DRM-ed P2P file sharing of theestimated 25 million songs currently available on the world's filesharing networks. All four major labels have signed deals with imeem and Last.fm
to allow them to offer free, on-demand streaming. The next phase couldbe licensing P2P – a moment that cannot come too soon for Qtrax, whichhas been trying to offer this service for over seven years. Limewire issaid to be pursuing a similar strategy.
Qtrax's feature set is of secondary concern in advance of more labeldeals being signed, but if/when those deals are signed, the companywould do well to have all of its ducks in a row software-wise, to avoidturning off users during what could be an initial rush try the service.
To that end, the company updated its Songbird-based software toversion 0.3 with linked artist names and keywords, four search options(artist, keyword, track or album), charts ranking the mostfrequently-traded files, user profile pages and regional sites forFrance, the US and the UK.
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