There we were reporting about a new filesharing service offering free music downloads — and the whole thing turned out too good to be true. QTrax was supposed to be a totally free, ad-supported filesharing service that would have shaken up the filesharing community.

QTrax was all set to go live on January 28, offering 25 million free music downloads. We were all led to believe that that major record labels were behind the new filesharing service. A major spanner was thrown into the works when the big four record labels cam out and denied any involvement with QTrax.

Each of the major labels has issued a statement denying any form of deal with QTrax. What actually happened was that QTrax did at one time have contracts with the big four when the company was testing a paid-download service. The contracts expired and QTrax never had a deal to go ahead with the ambitious program of offering free music downloads with the filesharing service.

The launch of QTrax has been postponed “for a short time”, whatever that means. Basically, QTrax messed up big time. This was quite possibly the worst possible launch of a filesharing service in history.

What a shame.

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