Today’s New York Times looked at QTrax, another attempt to establish ad-supported peer-to-peer distribution for free, legal music; it has deals with three of the four major label groups, and it originated as a rogue peer-to-peer company about four years ago. Coolfer pretty much sums up our feelings on why QTrax is doomed–particularly his point about how the insistence on calling QTrax a “file-sharing service” is misleading at best, and outright deception at the worst. While QTrax runs through the Gnutella client, the file selection will be limited by participating labels, and the files themselves will be DRM’d up the wazoo (according to the story, most major-label acts will allow five “free” plays before routing the user to a purchase page). Anyway, we’re sure that this splash will inspire a lot of chatter before the domain gets sold to a phone-card company or something in eighteen months’ time; in the meantime, we’re going to post an MP3 of the track we thought of every time we tried to write this item:

Q-Feel – Dancing In Heaven (Orbital Be-Bop) [MP3, link expired]
New Model for Sharing: Free Music With Ads [NYT]