'Sound' Service

Qtrax sucks! There, I typed it!

'Qtrax' should become the defacto expletive of 2008. Audiophiles and digital music obsessed futurists should be as offended by the "service" as I am on hearing the 'N' word used in public out of context, sans justification (and by 'N' word, I mean Napster... Napster 2.0 to be exact. Oh, you thought I meant...)

The Qtrax player is a shoddily rebranded distribution of Songbird (still in beta), which in itself, runs on Mozilla's XULRunner platform.
Qtrax should be an ad supported P2P network, full of legal music that can be streamed or saved to WMDRM compatible players. But it isn't. That's because there isn't any music on this service (although the site readily claims over 25million songs and just shy of 10million users... *cough* bullshit *cough*). None.
Admittedly, they are having difficulty securing deals with the top four record labels, but I cannot help but see this as a halfbaked cop-out.


I honestly cannot see why they couldn't have done the following: -

• Full downloads of free music (respectfully cached on their servers with artist/label consent)
• 'Fair Use' clips/samples (whether provided by artists/labels or individuals to save overhead)
• Featured tracks with legal streams to music blogs covering the newest and/or most popular artists and songs
  
• Links to purchase all songs cataloged to iTunes, Amazon, eMusic, Bleep, indie labels, etc (gaining affliation revenue in the process)
• Additional material (gigs, photos, reviews, competitions, mixs, sponsoring gigs)

Now, the above could be achieved with variable success BEFORE the big record labels have provided consent and at least given them a usuable service. The above could also be web based, as to allow people to become famillair with their brand before commiting to installing their client.

With a added P2P functionality, legal content featured and hosted on the service could be held in a shared folder on a clients computer and increase download speeds for other users depending on a songs popularity. Other material in the same shared folder would simply be ignored or cataloged and non-downloadable (checksums would be used for all transfers).

If they don't, I guess I could... hmm...


Examples to follow
The Hype Machine (MP3 blog aggregator with nifty design)
Last.fm (Makes iTunes look like an antisocial grandfather)
Elbo.ws (MP3 blog with interesting blog pinging feature)

Music Store Links
iTunes Store affiliate program (or standalone linkmaker)
Amazon affiliates
Emusic affiliate program
Warp Records Bleep (Select item and click "WEB TOOLS")

Flash Media Players and specifications (for developers)
http://www.xspf.org/applications/
http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Media_Player
http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net/