WOOHOO! Free Legal Music Downloads
You can download the software at 12:00am Monday Jan. 28th. I am so excited to hear this news. My ISP will probably shut off my service by the end of the week.
After a decade fighting to stop illegal file-sharing, the music industry will give fans today what they have always wanted: an unlimited supply of free and legal songs.
With CD sales in free fall and legal downloads yet to fill the gap, the music industry has reluctantly embraced the file-sharing technology that threatened to destroy it. Qtrax, a digital service announced today, promises a catalogue of more than 25 million songs that users can download to keep, free and with no limit on the number of tracks.
The service has been endorsed by the very same record companies - including EMI, Universal Music and Warner Music – that have chased file-sharers through the courts in a doomed attempt to prevent piracy. The gamble is that fans will put up with a limited amount of advertising around the Qtrax website’s jukebox in return for authorised use of almost every song available.
The service will use the “peer-to-peer” network, which contains not just hit songs but rarities and live tracks from the world’s leading artists.
***UPDATE 12:25AM 1/28/08***
So...I still haven't been able to download it. The website is being hit pretty hard, most of the time I cannot connect.
***UPDATE 1:12PM 1/28/08***
The record companies bailed. No free music.
***UPDATE 2:37PM 1/29/08***
Well I was able to download and install the software. It appears that, for now, some record company is providing music. The program does not work very well. It runs very slow and is a system resources hog, probably worse than AOL software. When the server didn't time out, It didn't return a search for the songs I was looking for. So far, I find it useless. Maybe it will get better.
