Qtrax Music Service

According to their website, Qtrax is "the world's first free and legal peer-to-peer (P2P) digital music site." It is similar to Napster and other P2P sites that shared music files in a manner that turns out to have been illegal. Qtrax claims to have made agreements with four major record labels that would then make this type of arrangement legal, but that may not be true according to several news articles. The way to 'pay' for the licensing was to show ads in the program used to download the music files.

The Beta Download that was supposed to be available today isn't yet available, so it appears there has been some sort of hold-up. I'll make sure to update this hub as I learn more - the idea is interesting, but if there are no deals with the record labels, then the whole thing is probably doomed. We'll see what happens in the next few days!

I was able to download the program today (1/28/2008), but haven't had a chance to try out all of the features yet.

(3/30/2008) It looks like it is up and running now, and the model of using advertising to pay for the "free" service will be an interesting experiment. 

Has anyone had any experience using it?