QTrax Continues To Spend Money Like It Has An Actual Product To Launch

noah | January 30, 2008 8:52 am

During the first dot-com bubble, I worked at a company that had a big, splashy launch party for one of its sites… even though the site hadn’t launched, and, as it turned out, never would. The beleaguered ad-supported site QTrax, which has spent between $1 and $1.5 million on its debut-that-wasn’t, seems to be taking a page from that book: A Romanian musician named Florin Grozea has apparently been on the comapny’s VIP list, and he’s been taking phonecam video of the company’s launch events, including the QTrax-sponsored LL Cool J concert that went on the other night despite the site still not working, or having any catalog. (He also has video of the company’s James Blunt show, but I’ll spare you.)

Between the money being spent like water, the stock-manipulation allegations, and the CEO’s sputtering about being sabotaged and the company’s wares really truly working for Macs, this whole thing is starting to seem like the plot for a Rob Schneider movie, in which our (well-meaning, but kinda slow) hero gets duped into being the figurehead for a seemingly legit company’s brave foray into the digital-music era. We’re at the part of the movie right now where ,the company’s seedy, one-step-up-from-penny-stock-spam motivations are coming to light, everything is crashing around Schneider, and the company’s founders are in an undisclosed location, sipping mai tais and rolling around in the money they got from their stock price shooting up from four cents to five. How will it all end? Perhaps with another LL Cool J performance!

Qtrax Partying Continues In Cannes, Dollar Figures Bubble [Digital Music News] Florin Grozea >>> Hi-Q [hiq.ro]