This sounds like the kind of "free music" idea that the labels would have (even though they are denying that they have signed a contract). QTrax is announcing free, ad supported music. Via the Times of London:

With CD sales in free fall and legal downloads yet to fill the gap, the music industry has reluctantly embraced the file-sharing technology that threatened to destroy it. Qtrax, a digital service announced today, promises a catalogue of more than 25 million songs that users can download to keep, free and with no limit on the number of tracks.

When you see the "sounds too good to be true" thing, best to check Engadget, where the stupo-meter on this starts to become obvious:

You know what your mother always used to say about things that seem too good to be true, but the deafening amount of hype and hyperbole being thrown about in reference to the "game changing" Qtrax with "25 million tracks" is quite distracting enough to take note of. According to the Qtrax website, the P2P client -- Windows only, a Mac version is slated for March 18th -- will be available at midnight EST, but while Qtrax is confident of its supposed deals with the majors, a few of those labels claim to be short of an actual deal with Qtrax. The business model is simple enough: DRM'd tracks count the number of times they're played and then report back to the mother ship -- which will divvy up revenue based on ad sales.

So... limited platfform support, DRM, a requirement to dock your player (what player will it work with?) periodically - yeah, there's a service I want to use. Wake me when this idea dies.

Technorati Tags: DRM, stupidity, copyright