"Who goofed? I've got to know," was one of the many soundbites heard on the late Jim Healy's legendary sports radio show in the '80s and 90s and it truly deserved to be sent over P2P networks the last 48 hours.
Qtrax, a company that says it has figured out how to monetize P2P music file sharing, said it had 25 million tracks ready to go and all four major labels on board. Foo Fighters and Lily Allen are featured prominently on their homepage; they even had a party at Midem in Cannes, France, with LL Cool J performing to declare their entry into the major leagues.
Big problem, though: They have no deals with the majors.
When news broke it seemed odd to me that none of the majors were issuing their own statements and when I checked with two of them, both responded with a quick "no deal in place." EMI was the first one aboard but that was a year and a half ago and beyond an initial announcement, neither the music company nor Qtrax has made any announcements of their involvement with each other. Add to that the recent management shakeup at EMI that has seen the company's top digital strategist ankle. They're not likely to be greenlighting deals like this one while building their new business model.
Secondly, and we saw this with the elimination of digital rights management at digital retailers, every major moves at their own pace. One jumps, another dips its toes and then another one goes whole hog until the final hold-out relents. It seems to be the m.o. of the music business since the days they had to decide when to ditch 78s and just go with 45s. They never just do anything all at once.
The question now is how does Qtrax crawl out of this mess and if they actually do ink a major, will the press believe them? And if they screwed this up, one has to wonder what else they might not get right.
Wired wonders if it's a stock scam.
The site exists but apparently has no music.
And before we even talk about the Beatles, the first prominent holdouts are Prince and Van Morrison. "Who goofed? I've got to know"