Vapourware: The tech that never was

By Nate Lanxon on 11 March 2008, 8:30am

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Qtrax
Qtrax was arguably the most botched digital music service launch ever. If you missed our coverage and didn't hear about it from one of the billions of other outlets reporting on the madness, Qtrax was/is supposed to be a free and legal music download service, with a catalogue of 25 million songs and distribution deals with all four major record labels. It's all ad-supported, complete with DRM and files taken from the Gnutella file-sharing network.

The only problem was that it didn't have 25 million songs, it didn't have deals with any major record labels and the DRM was simply slapped on the same files illegally acquired via programs such as LimeWire. Hardly the most promising of offerings, from both legal and consumer standpoints, but that didn't stop the company from having a massive par-tay with 'celebrities' (such as James Blunt) to celebrate the launch.

Worse still, the launch was late, and when the program for downloading music finally went public in its beta form, no music was available.

To this day, nothing has surfaced and the state of Qtrax as a product and a business remains unknown. Safe to say the record labels are somewhat miffed with the company and unlikely to trust it in future. Good riddance -- it's a daft idea anyway, slapping DRM on illegal but otherwise useful files.

As a matter of fact...
Even the Qtrax download manager and player software is a shabby bit of fiddling, as it's simply based on an application called Songbird -- a free bit of software built on Mozilla technologies.