Qtrax wants to give away songs via Peer to Peer networks and pay RIAA member companies royalties from revenue earned from ads. Their layer will be avaliable to download shortly – which means that someone is running a decent PR campaign behind the scenes.
They are making a big deal about the being Mozilla based, which means it may even work on OSX.
This Stuff Article says that you only need to view ads while searching or downloading songs, but the same article also states that the DRM will count the number of plays for each song. That smells of lock-in to their music player to me – so I can’t see much hope for this service. Most people already have their music stash loaded on to their PC, and have selected a player long ago.
This service may work if songs can be shifted straight to iTunes, but that makes the revenue model challenging.
Overall, the time for this was immediately post-Kazaa, and these folk have been in gestation for far too long. Their press-release page shows a deal signed was with Sony back in April last year, and you have to feel almost sorry for a company that requires an EVP of DRM.
