qtrax

I was getting ready to do a post about Qtrax, a new p2p music service. They seemed about half smart, using peer-to-peer to reduce their bandwidth requirements, but still stupidly DRMing the content. In theory, they do this to allow download tracking, but it's still stupid. You don't need DRM to track downloads, since you can just as easily generated a hash from non-DRMed content, and by DRMing they lost the iPod market -- in a similar way to how Netflix is currently not supporting Mac with their streaming service. So, half smart.

Except, it turns out Qtrax may still be all the way stupid. They claimed to have all the major labels on board, but today the majors denied having deals with Qtrax. Oops.