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New York-based Qtrax, which now bills itself as the "World's First Free and Legal P2P Music Service," promises to serve up between 25 million and 30 million copyrighted tracks to users over its file sharing network, dwarfing the the number of song downloads offered by rival services such as Apple's iTunes.
Qtrax claims to have struck a deal with all the major record labels whereby downloads will be tabulated and artists later compensated through advertising revenues garnered by the service. For end users, the service will be free, allowing unlimited music downloads that come wrapped in digital rights management (DRM) software to prevent their duplication.
Although the service launched on Monday without iPod support, Qtrax claims to have devised a way for its tracks to work on the Apple players, which have thus far been restricted to compatibility with DRM-free tracks of those wrapped in the Apple's proprietary FairPlay wrapper.
"We've had a technical breakthrough which enables us to put songs on an iPod without any interference from FairPlay," Allan Klepfisz, Qtrax's president and chief executive, told the Associated Press. Although the exec declined to give specifics on how Qtrax will make its audio files compatible with Apple devices, he noted that "Apple has nothing to do with it."
Qtrax says iPod compatibility could arrive as early as March. It's unclear, however, whether Apple will attempt to circumvent Qtrax compatibility in order to maintain the strong bond between the iTunes Store and its digital media player line.
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