I just heard about this story at Times Online. Qtrax will offer an unlimited number of free downloads of the largest collection of music so far: 25 million songs. You can't put them on your iPod, yet, but it still may come. They will make their money through advertising shown when you use the Qtrax software.

The Qtrax site says you can download their software at Sunday midnight, but I just tried and the download button wasn't activated yet.

***Update: Download is open and I just installed the application. They call it Songbird, and talk about changing it's 'feathers' like most people talking about getting skins. They aren't automatically letting people download music though. There's a notice on the site saying they will upon that up to people in stages. For now, I can just import from my collections and play music on it.

It still feels a little glitchy. When I switched to the small version, it weirded out and was a big box of grey nothing, but there was an icon to switch back. It didn't crash or nothing. There's a stupid Oracle advertisement on it, and I can't turn off the tab that has the Oracle advertisement. I wouldn't care so much if I was downloading music, but just sitting there with the ads staring back and no downloading to do, bleh. I'll check back in when I can start downloading.

***Update to the Update! Qtrax Backtrax?
This story just hit the wire at www.thisislondon.co.uk:

"Free music downloads site in chaos as record giants pull out"

Ouch. Hope this gets figured out so I can download some tunes.

Labels: music