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"Peter Kafka of Silicon Valley Insider is reporting that QTrax, the free &amp; legal peer-to-peer music service will finally be launching this Sunday.  However, if you're an iPod fan (I am) it won't be doing you a darn bit of good.\nThe problem comes in that the service will run on a proprietary program and will be ad supported.  All songs will be downloaded inside of the QTrax program, and played from there, and while the songs are playing you'll be seeing banner ads going by.  This is an essential part of the setup as two-thirds of each ad revenue dollar will go to the labels as their payment for leasing the songs to the service.\nWith the support of all the major record labels - boasting of having over 25 million songs; five times what iTunes offers - it could very well be the largest legal music repository ever.  With legality comes DRM for the files, sadly. But that was to be expected.\nFor now, the system will only available for Windows. A version for Mac is said to be due by March 18th.\nI think there is a very simple question here:  Why bother?\nWhy are people going to want to clutter up their systems with yet another proprietary system that is filled with DRMed music that they can't put on the most popular digital music player in the world?  True, you can hear the particular song you desire at any time. But with the abundance of streaming options out there (iTunes Radio, Slacker, Pandora, Last.fm to name a few), there are numerous options for hearing the type of music you choose at any given time without taking up space on your hard drive, or using more of your system resources than necessary.\nAdding insult to injury, QTrax will even let you import iTunes music to their player.  Are they going to turn off their ads while you listen to music you purchased elsewhere?  Somehow I doubt it.  Call me fickle if you must, but this has \"doomed startup\" written all over it.\n\n\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/01/26/qtrax-to-finally-launch-no-love-for-ipod-lovers/>